The fastest consumer SSD in the world? How do you go about creating the best, most responsive solid-state drive on the market today? Though NAND-based drives can claim super-impressive sequential speeds, responsiveness, which is key to excellent performance in the workstation and high-end desktop market, requires technology that has fundamentally lower latency. Enter Intel's Optane, powered by 3D XPoint memory.

The first question that needs answering is how 3D XPoint technology is better than ubiquitous NAND with respect to latency and, therefore, responsiveness and small-file performance. The answer rests with the way in which memory is accessed. With normal NAND, common in the vast majority of SSDs, data is stored in cells but is accessed in a collection of rows that are known as a page. These pages are usually between 2KB and 16KB in size, and a number of pages make up what is known as a block.