Intel has a brand new consumer-targeted storage product, referred to as Optane H20—as in H twenty, not water. The brand new gadget is an M.2 2280 format drive, utilizing QLC (Quad Degree Cell) NAND storage operating behind an Optane cache layer.
This is not Intel’s first attempt at an Optane-backed hybrid SSD—the primary, 2019’s Optane H10, made its approach into a couple of shopper laptops however did not make a lot of a splash. H20 is a second attempt, with a considerably improved QLC SSD and NAND controller.
What’s a QLC?
Typical NAND SSDs retailer information by sustaining cost ranges in particular person cells aboard a solid-state medium. How a lot information every particular person cell shops is configurable and has dramatic affect upon the associated fee, efficiency, and longevity of the NAND as an entire:
| Sort | Bits per cell | Discrete voltage ranges |
| SLC | 1 | 2 |
| MLC | 2 | 4 |
| TLC | 3 | 8 |
| QLC | 4 | 16 |
The only NAND storage kind, single-level cell (SLC), is the very best performing—with solely two discrete voltage ranges to take care of (“on” and “off”), cells might be written to and skim from with excessive pace and accuracy. It is also essentially the most sturdy type of NAND formatting, since growing “sloppiness” in cost ranges because the cells develop into worn is not a lot of an element.
Sadly, with solely a single bit saved per cell, SLC is kind of costly. In case your solely selection is between a tiny, costly SLC SSD and a standard laborious drive, this may be tolerable—as Intel’s unique X-25M SSDs demonstrated—however as soon as multi-level cell (MLC) drives hit the market, SLC quickly retreated to the land of cache layers and cost-is-no-object enterprise storage.
Triple-level cell (TLC) storage is the present “candy spot,” with the overwhelming majority of consumer-available SSDs in 2021 utilizing this expertise. Though slower than both SLC or MLC, with ample parallelization—that means extra “banks” of NAND in larger-capacity drives—TLC is greater than quick sufficient for many shopper and even enterprise use circumstances.
That leaves us with quad-level cell (QLC) storage. You will not discover any small-capacity QLC SSDs, as a result of the person NAND cells are sluggish—and never notably long-lived, both. Studying from and writing to QLC NAND storage means needing to differentiate reliably between 16 discrete voltage ranges—which is much slower on a per-cell foundation and ends in significantly fewer writes per cell earlier than tolerances erode sufficient to degrade efficiency even additional.
QLC is affordable, nevertheless it’s not low-cost sufficient to have develop into extremely popular but. Mechanical laborious drives are nonetheless far cheaper per TiB saved, and so they lack QLC’s longevity issues.
What’s an Optane?
Intel’s advertising for Optane has at all times been complicated—the corporate tends to name it “persistent reminiscence” relatively than storage, however in the end it is a totally different kind of SSD. What Optane is not is NAND expertise in any respect—it does not match into our “SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC” desk above.
Intel / Micron
Typical NAND-based SSDs work by storing cost—that’s to say, a specific voltage stage—in cells. Optane, as an alternative, works by various the resistance of its particular person cells. The transistor-less expertise ends in nonvolatile storage with extraordinarily excessive endurance and low latency. Optane is not as quick as DRAM—your laptop’s precise reminiscence—nevertheless it’s considerably nearer in efficiency than NAND might be.
Optane sits in a type of no man’s land between standard SSDs and traditional RAM—it is dearer and sooner than NAND SSDs, however cheaper and slower than RAM.
Does a hybrid Optane/NAND SSD make sense?
Individually, each QLC and Optane are effectively understood. The extra fascinating query is whether or not marrying the 2 in a single gadget is smart. Caching methods are usually way more troublesome to make efficient than most customers assume—recall the short-lived preliminary wave of enthusiasm for SSHDs, a category of mechanical laborious drive with built-in NAND SSD cache. In actual life, customers shortly realized that the “wonderful hybrid drive” did not truly outperform common HDDs most often, and its recognition plummeted in brief order.
Intel’s H20 banks on the identical promise these early “SSHDs” made—the concept that it will possibly current an affordable, massive storage quantity (QLC NAND, on this case) whereas providing efficiency ranges related to an enormously sooner onboard cache (Optane). StorageReview did some very mild benchmarking of the brand new drives with what seem like wonderful outcomes—its 4K random reads at queue depth 1 are almost triple what we recorded for the methods in our Gaming PC guide this yr.
The satan, sadly, is within the particulars—StorageReview’s restricted benchmarking was completed utilizing CrystalDiskMark, with an general information measurement of solely 1GiB. This small take a look at quantity is well-sized to suit solely contained in the H20’s 32GB onboard Optane cache, which won’t be the case for a lot of (if not most) typical shopper workloads.
Whether or not real-world use circumstances will likely be anyplace close to as well-suited to the H20 as they’re to this mild benchmark will likely be fascinating to see.
H20, H20 all over the place, with nary a drop to drink
Though the H20 turns into out there on June 20, you will not be capable of discover one in your nearest PC retailer. The brand new drives are to be offered on to Intel’s OEM companions for inclusion in certified methods with Eleventh-generation Intel CPUs.
Limiting distribution to OEM channel companions means we additionally do not know the precise value of the brand new 512GB and 1TB H20 drives—making it much more troublesome to evaluate the H20’s worth proposition versus extra conventional contenders, just like the Samsung 980.
