Straight from the newsroom today, Intel announces that they are now able to combine Intel Optane memory H10 with SSD storage. For the unaware, Intel Optane is currently the fastest SSD technology on the market but often than not, only comes with small capacities that requires the user to have more than one m.2 slot in their device; Namely thin and light laptops that do not have this luxury.

By also offering affordable storage together with their Optane offerings, it makes their fast memory solution more viable on more products than ever before.

We’ve seen this caching method a few times before. Previously offered on HDD devices such as the WD Raptor series of disk drives, this news comes as a natural progression of that concept.

Now while they did not list any kind of performance numbers in their news release, they did list a few use-cases as a gauge of performance, namely:

  • Launching documents up to 2 times faster
  • Launching games 60% faster
  • Opening media files up to 90% faster

Why this is important

Traditionally, any form of multi NAND stacking we have seen from manufacturers (MLC, TLC, QLC) have incurred penalties to performance along with a decrease of manufacturing costs to build higher capacity drives. QLC is the technology that has the most amount of performance penalty along with being the cheapest to manufacture. Intel is trying to alleviate this by introducing their Optane memory as a cache for certain applications which would hopefully increase read/write access speeds to that application.

 Although it remains to be seen whether the entire capacity of the Optane drive is being used as a cache or will Intel allow users to access part of this capacity as a separate, independent drive.

The Intel Optane memory H10 with solid-state storage will come in the following capacities, 16GB (Intel Optane memory) + 256GB (storage); 32GB (Intel Optane memory) + 512GB (storage); and 32GB (Intel Optane memory) + 1TB storage and will be available first through OEM manufacturers the likes of Dell, HP, ASUS and Acer with more to come.

Via Intel Newsroom

Chia is the horse-author from the far flung year of 2153. While not grazing on grass pastures or reviewing old time-y games and technology from the early 21st century pretending to not know what comes next (as to not disturb the space-time continuum), he can be seen exchanging vast quantities of Earth currency for parts needed to fix his damaged space ship.