[paulmd]

It is actually significantly faster than traditional flash-based (NVMe/SATA) SSDs for consumer workloads because flash performance falls off drastically at low queue-depths, and almost all consumer workloads have low queue-depths.

A lot of consumer applications are not really optimized around super-fast SSD storage in general. You end up with CPU bottlenecks initializing stuff and so on. So in many cases Optane is not noticeably faster than NVMe because the bottleneck moves to the CPU instead of the SSD.

The real problem is price, of course. I'd gladly replace all my flash with optane at $100/tb, but it's also an order of magnitude more expensive. Not sure if that's just an issue of economies of scale not being there or what, but I got a good deal on a 280 GB 900P (about $200) and that's enough super-fast storage for the things that really matter to me. I use 1 TB EX920s for the rest.

[Rafuino]

What do you use the 280GB 900P for in front of your 1TB drives? You're right the bottleneck is often somewhere else in the system once you have modern SSDs. The 280GB 900P is ~$0.89/GB [1] and 1TB EX920 is ~$0.15/GB [2] these days, so the cost delta is not an order of magnitude (i.e. >10x).

What's funny to me is that the first consumer flash SSDs Intel released were just over 10 years ago, and they were ~$7.44/GB with only 80GB capacities [3]. Things change quickly, eh?

[1] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E1682016...

[2] https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E1682032...

[3] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/Intel-x25-m-SSD,2012-15...