I'm curious how much this will cost. Could be a nice alternative to Optane, with none of the restrictions. Great to finally see drives that actually take advantage of M.2 slots.

schmidtbag:

I'm curious how much this will cost. Could be a nice alternative to Optane, with none of the restrictions. Great to finally see drives that actually take advantage of M.2 slots.

Having high sequential speeds isn't an alternative to much faster small file IOs and very low latency. 99% real world usage isn't just copying large files; I'm more interested in small file performance Optane is very good on latency and small IOs, but not enough to really make it worth the price premium. Next M.2 I'm interested in should blow my 960 out of the water(hopefully)

Agent-A01:

Having high sequential speeds isn't an alternative to much faster small file IOs and very low latency.

Understood; I completely agree. The article doesn't mention what the latencies are, but generally, PCIe-based drives have much better latencies than others. I'm not confident these drives will be better than Optane, but like I said, it could be a more affordable alternative, without the chipset restrictions.

99% real world usage isn't just copying large files; I'm more interested in small file performance

Likewise - pretty much the largest files I deal with are about 2GB. I actually still use SATA SSDs simply because the real-world everyday performance of them isn't a whole lot worse than M.2 drives, while usually being cheaper (I got my 1TB SATA SSD for around $200).

Optane is very good on latency and small IOs, but not enough to really make it worth the price premium.

Optane is too expensive to be worth it for the vast majority of people, but unlike most Intel products, I actually find it to be reasonably priced.