The real reason Intel killed its fastest SSDs, and why your next drive will be completely different

Published Jul 23, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT Zunaid Ali first became interested in technology after using a computer for the first time in 2006. He's been producing how-to content since 2018, reaching thousands of people in the process. As a kid, Zunaid used to read tech tutorials and troubleshooting guides on popular blogs. That made him want to start his own writing career. After the coronavirus pandemic, he finally decided to jump into the tech writing world. Before joining How-To Geek, he had written for HecticGeek, Distroid, and UbuntuPIT, among others. Zunaid first tried Linux when he wanted to learn Web Development in 2021. Due to his inexperience, he messed up his laptop trying to dual-boot Ubuntu with Windows. Frustrated, he went all-in with Linux and removed Windows completely. And that's when he fell in love with it. He's been actively experimenting with Linux since then. After finding his first writing gig on Linux in April 2022, he decided to specialize in it so he could share his knowledge and insights with fellow open-source enthusiasts. He joined How-To Geek in September 2023 and has been writing as a freelance contributor since then. Zunaid is currently pursuing his Bachelor's degree in Information & Communication Technology. When he's not writing, he's reading tech blogs, coding fun projects, or learning about new technologies. Other than Linux, he also has an interest in Android Development and Cybersecurity. He has experience in C/C++, Java, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and Python. You can find some of his hobby projects on his GitHub. For a few years, Intel Optane felt like it was cheating. Random reads that beat any SSD on the market. Latency low enough to make a spinning hard drive feel like a relic. And the most interesting side? A whole new memory tier that nobody else could touch. Then it just quietly stopped existing. Upon investigating its death, I found something intriguing. Because Optane wasn't killed by one bad call from Intel. It died from a few separate problems stacking on top of each other, and a couple of them aren't the reasons you'd expect. It cost way too much to actually build Stacking memory cells that many layers deep isn't cheap The whole appeal of 3D XPoint, the tech behind Optane, was density and speed at the same time. Getting there meant stacking crosspoint memory arrays in multiple layers. This required extra lithography and etching steps compared to regular NAND flash. Every one of those extra steps adds cost. That cost never really went away. Industry estimates put Intel's total investment in Optane at over $7 billion before the whole thing folded. Some analysts have broken that down further, estimating $2 billion in losses in 2017, another $2 billion in 2018, and $1.5 billion in 2019 on the 3D XPoint side of the business alone. That's not a rough launch quarter. That's nearly half a decade of bleeding money on a product line that never scaled the way Intel hoped. Nobody could agree on what it actually was RAM, storage, or cache? Even techies seemed unsure This is where things got a little messy for not-so-techie consumers. Intel didn't sell one Optane product. It sold two very different ones under the same name. The first version was Optane Memory, a tiny 16GB or 32GB module that sat between your hard drive and your CPU as a smart cache. The second was a full standalone SSD, like the 905P, meant to replace your storage entirely. Then Intel released the H10 and H20, hybrid drives that tried to combine both ideas into one product. Explaining all this to a buyer wasn't as easy as it seemed. That confusion had real consequences. Developers didn't build software specifically optimized for Optane because they couldn't be sure how a given system used it. On the other hand, regular buyers just avoided the whole category because of all the cache or memory confusion. WD_BLACK 2TB SSD Storage capacity 2TB Hardware Interface PCIE x 4 Compatible Devices Laptop, Motherboards Brand Western Digital TBW 7300 MB/s Dimensions 3.15"L x 0.87"W x 0.09"Th The WD_Black 2TB SSD is great for gaming. It offers read speeds of up to 7,300 mb/s and features an optional heatsink. The drive includes the wd_black dashboard software for monitoring health and customizing RGB lighting on compatible models. Its own manufacturing partner walked away Micron left before Intel did 3D XPoint wasn't an Intel-only project. Micron co-developed the technology and ran the fab that actually produced the chips. But Micron's chips were going almost entirely into Intel's own inventory instead of being sold on the open market, and that math never worked out for them. Once that happened, Intel was serving customers out of a shrinking stockpile rather than fresh production. It's part of a pattern with Micron too. The company has pulled back from consumer storage before, and Optane wasn't the first bet it walked away from once the math stopped working. Reports at the time pointed to roughly two years of inventory left on hand, which explains why the eventual shutdown came with a $559 million inventory write-off rather than a slow wind-down. Regular SSDs got good enough, fast The price gap with NAND never closed Optane's performance advantage was real. Its price disadvantage was just as real. Even late in its life, Optane cost roughly 5 to 10 times more per gigabyte than a comparable NAND SSD. Meanwhile, QLC NAND kept getting cheaper and more capable. It wasn't as fast or as durable as Optane. However, it crossed a threshold that mattered more to most buyers. It was good enough. A $100 NVMe drive felt plenty fast for gaming, editing, or daily use, and the subtle latency wins Optane offered just weren't visible enough to justify the premium for most people. Even now, SSD pricing keeps shifting based on capacity and demand rather than exotic memory tech, which tells you where the market's priorities really sat all along. The industry picked a different future entirely CXL became the new answer to the same problem This is the reason that catches people off guard. Optane wasn't just squeezed by cheaper storage. It got outpositioned by an open industry standard. When Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger confirmed the end of Optane's data center business, he pointed to the industry's shift toward CXL-based architectures as a driving factor. CXL solves a similar underlying problem. Expanding and pooling memory beyond what's physically attached to a CPU. But it does it as an open standard that multiple vendors can build for. Optane needed everyone to buy into Intel's proprietary, single-sourced memory. CXL just needed everyone to agree on a spec. Given the choice, the industry picked the open door. Optane's real legacy is the standard that replaced it Optane drives still beat most NVMe SSDs on random I/O today, but that was never going to be enough on its own. However, the mentioned problems, together, buried this genuinely faster technology. It's interesting to see the future of SSDs and where the next shift is happening so that before your next wrong buying decision, you're familiar with the industry.