MacBooks could be high ‘Optane’ in a few years…

Will new drive technology make your next notebook a speed freak?

MacBooks could be set for a major storage speed boost as early as next year, after reports emerged stating that Intel’s new Optane SSDs could be included in MacBooks in 2017.

Optane drives contain 3D XPoint tech, which allows data to be read and written in small sizes far more quickly than on current SSDs thanks to the transistor-less crosspoint architecture of the drive. In practice, that could mean speeds a thousand times quicker than current NAND storage, and a more durable device too. Optane would also be 10 times denser than the DRAM chips contained in many computer models around today.

Optane is reported to be making its way to Apple’s MacBook range first, before coming to PCs at a later date. Apple has often been an early and enthusiastic adopter of advanced technology in its machines, such as Thunderbolt and switching to PCIe‑based flash storage in recent years, and Optane is another innovation that will keep MacBooks at the head of the portable computing pack.

It was also recently announced at the Open Compute Project’s summit in San Jose, California, that Optane is compatible with the NVMe protocol used in the latest Retina MacBook storage, so that’s one less obstacle in the way of Optane-equipped MacBooks.