From ExtremeTech: Intel’s Optane business has been in the news for multiple reasons of late, as the company has expanded its product offerings and built out its product portfolio. One of the first uses for Optane drives that the company debuted was the idea of using Optane to create drive caches to accelerate conventional storage performance. Overall, the performance gains from doing so appeared generally similar to SSDs, though Optane was faster, on the whole. But now, as Optane gains strength, we’re seeing an interesting strategy from OEMs — selling customers a 32GB Optane drive, pre-integrated.
That’s the latest from Gigabyte, which has announced a lineup of Z370 motherboards that ship with an Optane drive preinstalled. Based on the ad copy and visuals, it appears that this is simply an M.2 drive preinstalled in the motherboard, not some kind of integrated, on-board storage that you can’t remove or replace.
As Gigabyte notes, the acceleration potential from adding an Optane drive is significant, at least compared with using no SSD or Optane at all. If you click through to the main landing page and note the “Core i7+” or “Core i5+” branding, that’s a new brand category Intel specifically created for companies to use when marketing Optane drives alongside motherboards or CPUs. The larger question is whether a Z370 customer is likely to still be using a hard drive in the first place. Maybe they are — but it seems a touch unlikely.
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