alt Hacker NewsI never understood why some fraction of technologists seem convinced that Optane was this amazing thing that would've been awesome if only Intel hadn't killed it.
It never made sense. It's slower than RAM, and what do I get for it? Persistence? I don't want persistent RAM, I like the ability to reboot to solve problems, and storing stuff on a non-volatile mediums has all sorts of legal implications which it's easier to avoid.
It's more expensive and has less storage than SSDs, even though the main downside of SSDs is their high price per gigabyte and relatively low capacities.
It's going in the wrong direction for both use cases. I guess it could have a very niche use case as a super fast persistent caching layer in front of spinning rust but that's kinda it.
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Huh. I wrote a whole thing here about serving a niche in serving local LLMs, but turns out, any niche it could have served is probably better served (per dollar) by either more RAM or modern SSDs.
There's an argument to be made for the persistent memory being a cheaper substitute for more RAM, but imo the gap isn't big enough to justify it when considered as a % of the rest of the system you're building around it and the performance tradeoff.
Important reminder to check your biases. I was sure Optane had missed its mark by dropping out just before LLMs became a primary use case for high $ systems.
> what do I get for it? Persistence?
Density. PCM is closer in bits-per-unit-area to Flash than to DRAM.
You can have very large MoE models run on small amounts of ram (or vram), if you can transfer the experts you need on the fly from ram to disk.
SSDs are good, but an improved Optane would've been better.
It somewhat (maybe) had sense for HDD caching but I don't think HDDs in 2026 are used in cases where separate cache is needed.
Sometimes, things are just cool.
Having a very low latency, durable write destination is a superpower for lots of database architectures (or things that share architectural details with databases, like some filesystems).
Optane had much lower latency than other types of durable storage, and also had very good endurance compared to NAND.
At a prior employer, we made extensive use of them as ZFS SLOG drives for large database servers. They made fsync very inexpensive.