Launched in 2017, Intel Optane technology has passed through the hardware market with more pain than glory, but in the beginning, it presented a more than promising premise to improve the performance of home PCs. In this article, we are going to tell you what this technology is, how it works, and in which cases you would be interested in implementing it on your PC.
In fact, the initial premise of Intel Optane technology has come to nothing. Initially, the technology giant placed a lot of emphasis on the benefits it could bring, especially to low-end PCs, but the evolution of the market has made its existence not very meaningful and for Intel, Optane has become like a secondary brand of other products, also secondary. Let's see it in detail.
What is Intel Optane and how does it work?
Physically, Intel Optane were very low capacity M.2 SSDs that served as system cache memory. As a general rule, the dedicated cache is usually used in high-performance and high-demand systems where thousands of simultaneous operations occur every second, and where it is more necessary to have fast storage that is not volatile to be able to use the calculations already made by the processor without having to recalculate them.
One of the things to consider with regard to the cache is how often the computer needs to access it. In reality, a home PC will rarely need to access this type of memory because, with the capacity and speed of current RAM, it has more than enough even when it comes to demanding tasks.
The fact is that in terms of performance, the idea of Optane is to noticeably reduce the access times to the system storage unit, that is, to the hard disk. The arrival of Optane came at the height of SSDs, which proved to provide performance several integers above traditional mechanical hard drives, allowing the most used data to be stored in Optane memory for faster access to them.
What has happened to this technology today?
The result was that with a mechanical hard disk it was possible to significantly increase performance, not at the level of an SSD but expensive. But even with a SATA 3 interface SSD, it is already recording a performance superior to that of Intel Optane, and since SSDs in M.2 format and with PCI-Express interface did not take long to arrive, the reality is that Intel Optane was a destined failure.
In the middle of 2021, Intel still markets the Intel Optane memory in two variants: H10 with solid-state storage and M10, but as we have even told you, Intel itself specifies in the case of M10 memory that is designed to work with hard drives. mechanical with SATA interface, precisely because it is in this case that an improvement in performance is noticeable.
And here comes the crux of the matter, who uses a SATA mechanical hard drive as a system disk today? Virtually no one, and those who do most likely do not have an Intel Optane compatible motherboard, because you do need the motherboard to be compatible with the technology for it to work.
All in all, and answering the headline's question, Intel Optane technology was a pretty good and promising approach to creating a dedicated cache on any PC in a way that speeds up data access time when using a slow hard drive, But with the rise of SSDs and their low access times, this technology stopped making sense and we could almost say that it died before being fully released.
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