mtcoothaman Loc: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Looking at new laptops ( Dell, HP or Lenovo) I notice some have Optane memory with higher end Intel processors. From the little I can find it adds,or substitutes for,Ram- type storage and works mainly with older style disc drives, not SSD.

Has anyone had experience of this or knows more?

Thanks

delkeener Loc: SW Rhode Island, USA

Duck Duck Go comes back with this: https://beebom.com/what-is-intel-optane-memory/

TriX Loc: Raleigh, NC

As I read the specs, it appears similar to Mac’s “Fusion” drives and other strategies where an SSD is used as a high-speed cache for a conventional HD. You can buffer up writes in SSD and later flush to disk over a longer time at a slower speed. The issue is with reads. If the computer can predict what the next blocks you’ll be reading from a drive (read ahead cache, ie: the data is “cacheable”), then the processor can move data from HD to SSD ahead of the projected reads. Unfortunately, not all data, such as random reads, are cacheable and cannot benefit from this strategy. An effort to produce disk storage at a lower cost than pure SSD with the higher capacity of HD and some of the advantages such as fast OS or application loads where the next read blocks are known.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Optane today, High Optane tomorrow?

Soul Dr. Loc: Beautiful Shenandoah Valley

When quantum computers ever become available to the general public, then I will be interested.

unlucky2 Loc: Hemet Ca.

WWW.Tomshardwareguide.com has the info you seek. Basically it is an Intel Hdd pre-fetch that bypasses the south bridge. NVe M2 is a better solution.

mtcoothaman Loc: Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

Thanks all for your help.

I am not sure I fully comprehend the tech references but I now understand what they are trying to achieve. I now have a little more time to research as I managed to revive my Dell laptop after all. However it is 5yrs old . Interestingly it has an i7 processor, 8G of Ram and 1 TB of storage and after all this time many of the current offerings are not much further advanced.