Intel's New Optane Memory Technology Breathes New Life Into Existing Hard Drives

SSD has superior benefits compared to the conventional hard drives that are used today in laptops and desktops. However, SSDs are more expensive than hard drives preventing them to reach mainstream consumer market. Intel Optane memory is built to speed up the conventional hard drive without breaking the bank.

Intel Optane is the first consumer market product built specially to speed up the HDD to match the performance of an SSD. These memory modules could revolutionize the storage industry and provide a cheaper alternative to SSD. This memory acts as a cache to store frequently accessed files and can only be used as a boot drive.

The Optane memory uses M.2 NVMe SSD to store the data. It uses PCIe 3.0 slot for better performance and read/write speeds. The Optane memory from Intel can achieve a read speed of upto 1200MB/s and write speeds of upto 280MB/s, Anandtech reported. However, the daily endurance for these memory devices is significantly low at 100GB of writes per day.

It is clear that these drives are not meant for regular data storage purpose and only to increase the performance of a regular hard drive by caching. Intel has used Rapid Storage Technology drivers to boost the performance of its Optane memory. These memory devices come in 16GB and 32GB capacities.

There are limitations and restrictions to use the Optane memory such as- the memory only supported on Windows 10 64-bit and only for the boot volume. Also, the users need to have a Kaby Lake generation 200-series motherboard and Kaby Lake processors to use the memory. This means that users with the previous generation hardware are left out, PCWorld reported.

The Optane memory retails for $44 (16GB) or $77 (32GB) and is available for pre-order and will ship April 24. This is a relatively cheap memory upgrade for desktop users who want a fast system but don't want to compromise on the storage provided by HDD. Laptop users might not find the drive efficient because of its relatively high power consumption of 0.9-1.2W at idle state.