Quote:That's exactly how Intel plans to establish its new storage products. Some companies have already bundled Intel's Optane Memory with their motherboards to increase awareness about the technology. Early reports appear positive in user reviews as many see first-hand just how good the technology really is. And this is just the first step designed to remove hard disk drives, and their latency, from the user experience altogether.
...
We've asked Intel several times about using Optane Memory in front of very low cost SSDs to increase system performance and received the same "no comment" answer as we get with any rumor fact checking subject. The difference in this case is the inability to hide the ear-to-ear grin that inadvertently tells us that has been the plan for Optane Memory all along.

Quote:The display is the first to show what four 380GB 905P SSDs in RAID 0 can achieve when paired with a great motherboard and an 18-core Extreme Edition to process all the data. The system chews through 10,000MB of sequential data in a single second, a 4x improvement over a single 900P 480GB Optane SSD. The drives scale well in RAID 0 with this workload, but users have to give up low queue depth random performance. ASRock's solution is to use a 480GB Optane 900P for the system's boot drive and then utilize the VROC array feature for heavy sequential workloads like intense video editing.

Intel hasn't disclosed when the 905P M.2 SSDs will hit e-tailers, but we expect to see the components before the end of 2018. Using a single drive, or an array built with several drives, is the best way to accelerate any complicated workload, but there are advantages of building the Optane storage for specific tasks in the workflow. We hope to see Intel make improvements to VROC in the future so one path delivers the best of both worlds. The feature allows us to break past the PCH limits by going around the chipset to send data directly to the CPU. Maybe Intel's upcoming 5GHz 28-core processor can get us around the low random performance of VROC.