  Emerging non-volatile memory technologies (NVRAM) offer alternatives to hard
drives that are persistent, while providing similar latencies to DRAM. Intel
recently released the Optane drive, which features 3D XPoint memory technology.
This device can be deployed as an SSD or as persistent memory. In this paper,
we provide a performance comparison between Optane (SSD DC4800X) and NVMe (SSD
DC3700) drives as block devices. We study the performance from two
perspectives: 1) Benchmarking of drives using FIO workloads, and 2) Assessing
the impact of using Optane over NVMe within the DataSpaces framework for
in-memory data staging to support in-situ scientific workflows.
