Intel® Optane™ Storage

Intel® Optane™ SSDs fill the critical storage hierarchy gap to break through traditional NAND storage bottlenecks, accelerate applications, and enable more work per server. With an industry-leading combination of high throughput, low latency, high QoS, and high endurance, Intel® Optane™ SSDs speed up access to critical data needed to process transactions, gain new insights, and differentiate services.

Intel® Optane™ technology is the unique combination of Intel® Optane™ memory media with the Intel® advanced system memory controller, interface hardware, and software IP. The memory media architecture lets Intel® Optane™ technology act like DRAM, with byte addressability, high endurance, and write in place, or traditional storage with block addressability, depending on the use case or product form factor.

The primary technology underlying Intel® Optane™ technology products is a new memory and storage media that is inherently different from NAND. The new storage media is transistorless and bit-addressable, faster and more durable than NAND, and also avoids many shortcomings of NAND drives. Intel® Optane™ SSDs offer breakthrough performance at all queue depths (and differentiated at low depths), making them 6x faster than NAND.¹ They also provide consistently fast storage reads and fast storage writes without degradation under high write pressure and high loads. Intel® Optane™ SSDs improve quality of service (up to 60x better than NAND)² and very high endurance storage (up to 20x more total terabytes written than NAND).

Although Intel® Optane™ persistent memory (PMem) and Intel® Optane™ SSDs use the same Intel® Optane™ memory media, they are vastly different products. Intel® Optane™ PMem is in a DIMM package, operates on the DRAM bus, can be volatile or persistent, and acts as a DRAM replacement. Intel® Optane™ SSDs, on the other hand, are strictly used for fast storage residing in standard NAND package models (such as AIC, M.2, U.2, and EDSFF), reside on the PCIe bus using the NVMe protocol, are always persistent for storage reasons, and act as a fast storage replacement.^{1 2 3}