Now that you all had the chance to ask Intel your biggest questions regarding Intel Optane, we wanted to know your thoughts. Do you use Intel Optane products or intend to add these storage devices to your system in the near future?
In full disclosure, I am not an Optane user. When building my latest rig, I did consider it. There was a lot of back-and-forth about the subject between the moderators and myself, but in the end I decided not to. The main use case would be to improve game load times. I have a pretty large library of Steam games, and an extensive collection of classic game backups I play with an emulator. All in all my game library tallies up to roughly 4TB in size. While this isn't the largest games library, it's still fairly large. Getting a single SSD with enough storage space to fit 4TB of games is not exactly cheap.
While SSD prices have gone down, and you'd be silly to buy a hard disk drive ever again, at the time of writing a single 4TB SSD still costs over $500. I simply didn't have room in my budget for such a purchase. And so, I did consider opting for Optane when assembling my components list. I thought that I would get the best of both worlds with Intel Optane: lots of storage space and a speedy cache drive to load all my games. Even then, I just couldn't make the pricing work. The latest and greatest usually has a requisite expensive price, and Intel Optane is no different. The Intel Optane 800p costs roughly $175 for 118GB, while a 512GB Samsung 970 Pro M.2 SSD can be purchased for around $160. The pricing for true Optane caching just didn't work in comparison. That's not to say I'm not a fan of Intel Optane technology. I just couldn't find the right use case scenario for my needs and my budget.
And with that, I turn to you dear readers for all of your hot takes. What do you think of the Intel Optane product line? Do have any Optane products in your system at the moment? Do you plans to use Optane in your next build? We know there are tons of use case scenarios for Intel Optane, so workstation and server builders, please chime in as well!
Don't forget! We're running a 3 week long giveaway for the Intel Optane SSD 905p 960GB. Check out the contest entry page for a full list of rules and ways to enter.
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