Re:Intel Kills Off All Optane-Only SSDs for Consumers, No Re...
by imtringued on Sunday January 17, 2021 @04:19AM
(#25809364)
IOPS are actually meaningless assuming conventional filesystem APIs. In the context of those APIs, IOPS are just a different way of writing MB/s except you get to show off that your block sizes are smaller.
Latency is a much bigger factor with conventional filesystem APIs. If you had fully async filesystem APIs that read offset x1 on file f1, offset x1 on file2, offset x100 on file f100 all at the same time then you would see linear scaling and the difference between Optane and NAND would grow smaller. However, that would require learning a new and much harder paradigm (you now have to be aware of parallelism inside SSDs). Optane is a simple upgrade that requires no software changes.
Latency is a much bigger factor with conventional filesystem APIs. If you had fully async filesystem APIs that read offset x1 on file f1, offset x1 on file2, offset x100 on file f100 all at the same time then you would see linear scaling and the difference between Optane and NAND would grow smaller. However, that would require learning a new and much harder paradigm (you now have to be aware of parallelism inside SSDs). Optane is a simple upgrade that requires no software changes.