Post #3901743

2026-07-18 03:38 UTC

A line of memory from Intel that's like NAND, but it's not NAND. It's 3D Xpoint, very good at random reads or sequential reads. sudo hdparm -t /dev/nvme0n1p1 /dev/nvme0n1p1: Timing buffered disk reads: 2682 MB in 3.00 seconds = 893.33 MB/sec sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda /dev/sda: Timing buffered disk reads: 670 MB in 3.01 seconds = 222.89 MB/sec Edit: when the swap was at my main drive, the sequential reads were like 140 MB/s

Replies (2)

@luthis@lemmy.nz 2026-07-18 03:40

This is why I didn’t bother going a web search, this is a much better more concise answer than I would have got. I totally understand now

Open ##3901741
@Overspark@piefed.social 2026-07-18 07:41

One of the main advantages of Optane doesn’t easily show in a benchmark: it doesn’t have to do any cleanup. Normal SSD’s cheat all the time by caching writes in DRAM and an SLC portion of the NAND. Usually that works fine and you won’t notice, but if you keep writing then at some point performance will plummet dramatically. Also, the SSD’s need a breather every now and then to rewrite that cached data to it’s final place, during which time performance is also worse. Optane doesn’t need any of that. You can write to it at max speed 24/7 and it’ll just take it and keep going, at ridiculously low latency. Perfect for handling large non-stop data streams, or workloads that need a guaranteed low latency (both for reading and writing). It’s a real shame the concept failed, the tech was fantastic.

Open ##3905503