It looks like Intel is working heavily on their upcoming Optane solid state drives. According to the vendor the DC P4800X should offer 21 times the endurance compared to MLC NAND flash memory. All these new solid state drives are going to be based on the 3D X-Point to non volatile memory of which Intel is hoping that it’s going to replace a NAND flash.


The Optane DC P4800X solid state drive will only feature 375 GB of storage capacity. Featuring a half-height PCI Express form factor with a PCI Express 3.0 x4 host interface it should crank out sequential transfer rates of up to 2400 MB/s read performance and 2000 MB/s sequential write performance. Compared to the latest M.2 solid state drives this doesn’t really sound like much but the key aspect of the new 3D X-Point based drives is endurance. On the other hand random writes and reads performance appears to be on a very competitive level. According to Intel 555,000 IOPS are achieved with four 4K random reads and add in the case of 4K random writes 500,000 IOPS can be hit.

Although this is only a 375 GB drive Intel mentions an endurance rating of 12.3 petabytes of total bytes written (TBW). Usually these endurance ratings are only achieved with drives featuring much higher capacity, since in that case there are more cells to wear out. In reverse this implies that overall endurance must have been increased.




Source: Techpowerup