Intel last week notified its customers about its plans to discontinue its datacenter-oriented Optane SSD DC P4800X solid-state drives, which are among the last storage devices based on 3D XPoint memory. The company says its final Optane SSD DC P4800X products will be shipped to customers by October. Still, Intel has a number of other Optane-branded offerings.
Intel asks its partners to place their last orders for Optane SSD DC P4800X 375GB, 750GB, and 1.50TB drives in a PCIe 3.0 x4 form factor by May 30, 2023, and intends to deliver its final drives by September 30, 2023. For now, Intel’s Optane SSD DC D4800X in a 2.5-inch U.2 form factor will continue to ship, although clearly the writing is on the wall for these drives too.
Despite officially axing its Optane business unit last year, Intel has continued selling Optane-branded SSDs based on 3D XPoint memory for data centers. For now, Intel will continue to supply customers its Optane SSD P1600X, Optane SSD DC D4800X, Optane SSD DC P5800X/P5801X, and Optane SSD DC P5810X drives. Also, the company will keep selling its Optane persistent memory modules for now. But given that 3D XPoint memory is no longer in production, obviously the supply of remaining Optane-branded products is going to run out somewhat soon.
Cost was clearly one of the main reasons the tech never really took off on the consumer side. But Intel’s 3D XPoint memory offers endurance that far exceeds that of 3D NAND memory. So the demand for Optane SSDs with endurance ratings of 100 drive writes per day is quite strong in the data center space, despite their high prices.