For $144 you can get a 256GB M.2 SSD, big enough to use as a boot drive. Even as a cache for a slow hard-drive (which means you also need to buy a hard drive, possibly bumping the cost up to 512GB SSD prices) means this product doesn't make any sense at all. Maybe it made sense when they started development, but it doesn't now.
Flunk, the reason to get these drives is that an Optane cache + standard hard drive is FASTER and LARGER CAPACITY than the 512 GB SSD. If you don't like larger or faster, then go ahead with just a SSD.
You can? You used to be able to use a 64GB cache on Intel boards, and you can use a 512GB cache on just released AMD (470) boards [unfortunately, that bit of the review still has [words] under the storeMI section].
If you can pull it off, a 512GB caching SATA drive makes all kinds of sense for anything you might want to do with this. As near as I can tell, Optane's only advantage is that they provide the caching software without having to hit windows and motherboard requirements. Which makes the whole "optane is so fast" advantage a bit of a joke.
Wake me up when optane has the endurance to be used with a DDR4 interface (presumably with caching HBM2/Intel system DRAM). This doesn't give any advantage (besides providing the software license).
Windows Storage Spaces or ZFS can do it. Right now I have 2x256GB SSDs mirrored to accelerate a 5x4TB hard drive array. I set 100GB as a write-back cache that automatically flushes to the HDDs, so random write is SSD-level quick. I also pin about 20GB of files to the SSDs permanently and the rest is rotated between free space and system-managed hot files.
400-500MB/s vs 1.5GB/s, not really much of a difference, either way you will have to wait for that HDD to write to the cache drive 1st at 100MB/s or less (since they're small files, HDD works faster on transfer with larger files).
If you got a set of constantly used files, move those to the SSD, problem solved.
Or you buy an X470 motherboard or pay $10 to get StoreMI, which also makes a cache but is much cheaper and can use any SSD as a cache, which saves you money, allot of it.
It's faster in zero real-world situations. It's larger than an SSD bought for the same total money, but not larger than an SSD at the same cost as the optane drive (256GB) + the same HDD you'd use for optane caching. Your point is... flawed.
This is actually not true. It's faster for Mysql/sqlite in 4k situations when the cache is tuned for it. What uses sqlite? - games, most office software, web browsers..
For $160-$170 (<$150 on sale, basically the price of 64GB of Optane) you can get a the WD Black 512GB M2 NVME PCIe SSD that does 2000MB+/sec rear for all 512GB.
Why the hell is Optane so expensive. 5-7x the price of traditional NAND?
I have 8 TB drive AND I would enjoy some speedup as current usual run takes ~~5h full run. With that 32 GB joke drive even if it would not double the speed, Speedup of 20% time is a lot in my case. AND I don't get to redesign anything to use another drive or have to build 8 TB ssd raid.
I've got an 80gig in my desktop, a 60 in an Asus laptop that has two 2.5 bays and a 16gig M.2 in my Inspiron 7559.
I don't use RAM as a buffer, just the SSD. Works great, unless you have an unstable system. Any time you lose power or don't shut down cleanly the cache resets. With the cache, however, my main box boots in about 20-30 seconds, all apps loaded, where as just running the mechanical drive a reboot is nearly a 4 minute affair.
Where does Idiot-Zilla prove that Optane works "better" with AMD motherboards than Intel?
But for a site that starts with "Fud" I will give them credit for dispelling the completely wrong "FUD" that is actually spread by AMD fanboys that Optane is a proprietary technology that only works with Intel products. Never has been proprietary.
Intel was the one who claimed a coffee lake motherboard was needed for optane. Most likely the slow speed has to do with the spectre/meltdown fix that greatly slows down disk operations done in different user spaces on Intel chips
Still don't see why a user should choose a 64gb optane drive over, say, a 500gb mx500, which you could use 64gb for caching using RST. The performance difference between optane and an mx500 won't be noticeable when doing normal stuff like booting up and launch apps.
There are a lot of folks who use their computers for more than just running Chrome and a few games. Many people with professional workflows have storage drives in the 4-8+ TB range but only need to work with ~50-100GB of data at a time. In these scenarios the active data will be automatically cached on the Optane drive and their workflows can be greatly accelerated without the need to copy it to a separate SSD scratch drive before working on it. If you have so little data that you can just run off of a 500GB SATA SSD then obviously just buy the MX500.
You can use Optane drives like any SSD though. Even if these are being marketed as a caching only thing, you can still use it however you like. Want to pay less to try out software caching? Get the cheaper one then and try it out.
People seem to be talking around each other in these threads, without actually reading the substance of each person's reply.
Dr. Swag didn't mention ONLY using a 500GB SSD. Just the opposite. He/she was suggesting that you could use a 500GB SSD for both a boot drive AND a 64GB cache drive. So you end up with ~440GB of normal SSD space (enough for most programs) AND a ~60GB cache drive to speed up your HDD accesses. All for the same price as adding a 64GB optane drive.
Addressing Dr. Swag's actual comment: I partially agree. One downside to the arrangement you suggested is that most affordable SSDs have lower write endurance than cache drives. They are also likely to be slower than an optane drive (but still fast compared to HDDs). And if your SSD boot/cache all-in-one drive dies, you might lose data on both the SSD and the HDD.
Regarding WithoutWeakness: Your comment makes sense if you are accessing the same subset of data over-and-over again. But if you are accessing a block of data ONCE to run an analysis and then moving onto a new block of data, then you will experience HDD speeds. Same goes for the first access to the data in cases where you will be using it multiple times. Slow the first time, faster in future times. So the downsides of a small cache will remain in a number of scenarios.
I personally think that Intel missed the boat with Optane. These solutions would have been a lot more convincing when SSD storage was a lot more expensive (i.e. 5+ years ago) and before other caching options existed for making use of 'normal' SSDs.
From what I know so far, the MX500 (500GB) cache contains unique data that has not yet been written to normal nand and Crucial does not recommend using an SLC cache unless you have battery backup protection
An Optane cache drive is a "copy" of data already on the hard drive (or SSD) and I don't see a problem with power loss resulting in data loss once you clear the cache
Is anybody else interested in the performance of the 800p as a cache drive? The difference between an Optane SSD 800p and a 1TB HDD versus a 1TB SATA drive nowadays is less than $15, so it's pretty comparable for effectively the same capacity of storage. On the other hand, in the 25 or so graphs presented in this review, the 118GB caching solution outperforms a SATA drive, sometimes handily, in 24 of them. The 25th is power consumption, and one of them has a single loss in run 1 of the latency measurement for the heavy test.
Hell, sometimes that solution outperforms the 900p. Why would you pick a comparably priced 1TB SATA SSD over something like that? If you need less storage, a 500GB will perform even worse than a 1TB, and a 250GB would be even worse still. Going down in capacity on the Optane drive would still probably keep you in the range of the SATA drive, while leaving you with double or quadruple the capacity.
"58GB 800P is functionally identical to the 64GB M10 and both have the exact same usable capacity of 58,977,157,120 bytes."
Hold on, either something is wrong or that is straight-up false advertisement, a new low that is far beyond how storage manufacturers usually inflate their capacity specs. Don't just breeze past the part where Intel may be illegally marketing this thing. As far as I know Optane doesn't use over-provisioning, and it definitely isn't the normal GiB/GB conversion issue or the typical "formatting" excuse that doesn't actually apply to solid state media, so what gives?
Could you tell us why the performance is much lower? I was thinking Meltdown but 800P article says it has the patch enabled. The random performance here is 160MB/s for 800P, but on the other article it gets 600MB/s.
The synthetic benchmarks in this review were all run under Windows so that they could be directly compared to results from the Windows-only caching drivers. My other reviews use Linux for the synthetic benchmarks. At the moment I'm not sure if the big performance disparity is due entirely to Windows limitations, or if there's some system tuning I could do to Windows to bring performance back up. My Linux testbed is set up to minimize OS overhead, but the Windows images used for this reivew were all stock out of the box settings.
FIO version 3.6, Windows binaries from https://bluestop.org/fio/ (and Linux binaries compiled locally, for the other reviews). The only fio settings that had to change when moving the scripts from Linux to Windows was the ioengine option for selecting which APIs to use for IO. On Linux, QD1 tests are done with synchronous IO and higher queue depths with libaio, and on Windows all the queue depths used asynchronous IO.
In this review I also didn't bother secure erasing the drives between running the burst and sustained tests, but that shouldn't matter much for these drives.
The Meltdown+Spectre workarounds don't have anywhere near this kind of impact on Linux, so I don't think that's a sufficient explanation for what's going on with this review's Windows results.
Last year's Optane Memory review only did synthetic benchmarks of the drive as a standalone device, not in a caching configuration because the drivers only supported boot drive acceleration at that time.
The strange performance may also explain why its sometimes faster in caching than when its standalone.
Certainly the drive is capable of faster than that looking at raw media performance.
My point with the last review was that, whether its standalone or not, the drive on the Optane Memory review is getting ~400MB/s, while in this review its getting 160MB/s.
AMD's solution works in the same way, in that as you run programs it stores data to the cache drive. The big difference is AMD's solution let's you use any SSD as a cache drive. This means it can be any size and it doesn't require an addition purpose. This is especially important, give the huge price tag of the larger optane drives.
Speed wise though, assuming the Intel SSD is actually big enough to cache all your data, they are about equal. Of course, the AMD solution would be slower if you used a really low end SSD as your cache drive. It could also be much faster if you used a really good SSD though. The Intel optane drive has performance numbers similar to a 960 evo. The problem for Intel though are the small sizes and large prices. $200 for only 118GB of space is not a good solution. You could get double that space with a brand new 250GB 960 evo and it costs half as much. That's assuming you want to keep that drive for caching only, you could simply use your current SSD with the AMD solution and save $200+ altogether.
I simply don't see a universe where Optane makes sense.
Any chance you could test one of these drives with AMD's new caching solution? AFAIK the drives show up as regular NVME devices, so it should work in theory. Would be really interesting to see these solutions compared, and if Ryzen or Threadripper can make proper use of Optane caching through third-party software.
So what's the point of this when AMD is giving away StoreMi with it's X470 boards? From what I've seen from reviews of the product, it works exceptionally well. It also doesn't require you to buy another drive and it can use much larger SSDs as a cache.
You can definitely ignore Intel's marketing pitch about these. But you can use ANY Optane drive, including ones mentioned here like ANY OTHER SSD out there. So you can make it work with StoreMi too. You have to decide which drive benefits your workload more and how and what your budget is. Optane has inherent benefits that beats out NAND is many ways. But again, just depends on what you want. The smaller GB ones are pretty damn cheap in my opinion. So worth just trying out.
Reminds me of back in the days, when you could buy a weird plastic screen, that claimed it would turn your black and white television into a color-TV....
one of the distinguishing points, so to speak, of XPoint is its byte-addressable protocol. but I've found nothing about the advantages, or whether (it seems so) OS has to be (heavily?) modified to support such files. anyone know?
The byte-addressability doesn't provide any direct advantages when the memory is put behind a block-oriented storage protocol like NVMe. But it does simplify the internal management the SSD needs to do, because modifying a chunk of data doesn't require re-writing other stuff that isn't changing. NVDIMMs will provide a more direct interface to 3D XPoint, and that's where the OS and applications need to be heavily modified.
Quite impressive but for 32GB Optane drive, I can have a 250 GB SSD.
The Optane might improve performance for fractions of a second over SSDs for applications but it won't help during program/driver installations or Windows updates which needs more speed.
I'd reconsider it for a 64 GB Optane as a boot drive for the current price of the 32GB.
You've got to feel for Intel. They spend a tonne of cash on projects like Larrabee, Itanium and Optane and the market and tech reviewers mostly respond with a shrug.
And then everyone complains they're being complacent when it comes to CPU design. Mind you they clearly were - CPU performances increased at a glacial rate until AMD released a competitive product and then there was a big jump from 4 cores to 6 in mainstream CPUs with Coffee Lake. Still if the competition was so far behind you can afford to direct to R&D dollars to other areas.
Still it all seems a bit unfair - Intel get criticised when they try something new and when they don't.
And Itanium, Larrabee and Optane all looked like good ideas on paper. It was only when they had a product that it became clear that it wasn't competitive.
While I don't doubt the tests are valid, I would really like to see a test with say PrimoCache - with the blocksize set to 4k. I have found in my own testing that Optane (with PrimoCache using optane as an L2 @ 4k) is very worthwhile even for my Samsung 950 pro.
Thinking of using this with 12 tb hgst for a gamedisk drive for a ISCSI-based server, the data read is usually the same as they only game files. But occasionally new game gets added. Would it be a better option compared to raid? SSD are too expensive.
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Flunk - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
For $144 you can get a 256GB M.2 SSD, big enough to use as a boot drive. Even as a cache for a slow hard-drive (which means you also need to buy a hard drive, possibly bumping the cost up to 512GB SSD prices) means this product doesn't make any sense at all. Maybe it made sense when they started development, but it doesn't now.dullard - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Flunk, the reason to get these drives is that an Optane cache + standard hard drive is FASTER and LARGER CAPACITY than the 512 GB SSD. If you don't like larger or faster, then go ahead with just a SSD.bananaforscale - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
You totally miss the point. An SSD is cheaper and irrelevantly slower and you can use it for caching.wumpus - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You can? You used to be able to use a 64GB cache on Intel boards, and you can use a 512GB cache on just released AMD (470) boards [unfortunately, that bit of the review still has [words] under the storeMI section].If you can pull it off, a 512GB caching SATA drive makes all kinds of sense for anything you might want to do with this. As near as I can tell, Optane's only advantage is that they provide the caching software without having to hit windows and motherboard requirements. Which makes the whole "optane is so fast" advantage a bit of a joke.
Wake me up when optane has the endurance to be used with a DDR4 interface (presumably with caching HBM2/Intel system DRAM). This doesn't give any advantage (besides providing the software license).
shadowx360 - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
Windows Storage Spaces or ZFS can do it. Right now I have 2x256GB SSDs mirrored to accelerate a 5x4TB hard drive array. I set 100GB as a write-back cache that automatically flushes to the HDDs, so random write is SSD-level quick. I also pin about 20GB of files to the SSDs permanently and the rest is rotated between free space and system-managed hot files.Lolimaster - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
400-500MB/s vs 1.5GB/s, not really much of a difference, either way you will have to wait for that HDD to write to the cache drive 1st at 100MB/s or less (since they're small files, HDD works faster on transfer with larger files).If you got a set of constantly used files, move those to the SSD, problem solved.
evernessince - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Or you buy an X470 motherboard or pay $10 to get StoreMI, which also makes a cache but is much cheaper and can use any SSD as a cache, which saves you money, allot of it.CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You can use any Optane drive like ANY SSD too.Spunjji - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
It's faster in zero real-world situations. It's larger than an SSD bought for the same total money, but not larger than an SSD at the same cost as the optane drive (256GB) + the same HDD you'd use for optane caching. Your point is... flawed.Keljian - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
This is actually not true. It's faster for Mysql/sqlite in 4k situations when the cache is tuned for it. What uses sqlite? - games, most office software, web browsers..Samus - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
For $160-$170 (<$150 on sale, basically the price of 64GB of Optane) you can get a the WD Black 512GB M2 NVME PCIe SSD that does 2000MB+/sec rear for all 512GB.Why the hell is Optane so expensive. 5-7x the price of traditional NAND?
Arnulf - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Because it is crap which nobody would buy if it was priced close to SSDs of similar performance and capacity:"It costs 5-7 times more than SSDs, must be something magical about it, let's buy one honey!"
Much like $1000 mobile phones, bait for the stupid.
CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Because it uses phase change instead of NAND and it's new tech. They're trying to recoup R&D cost.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
"hey're trying to recoup R&D cost. "PCM is decades old tech. look it up. throwing good money after bad, just like pharma.
deil - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
I have 8 TB drive AND I would enjoy some speedup as current usual run takes ~~5h full run. With that 32 GB joke drive even if it would not double the speed, Speedup of 20% time is a lot in my case. AND I don't get to redesign anything to use another drive or have to build 8 TB ssd raid.Spunjji - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
On what basis do you think you'll achieve any speed-up, though?tipoo - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Yeah, I can't see why 5x the NAND for the cost wouldn't almost always be preferable for budget systems.I can only see this making sense for datacenter use.
0ldman79 - Thursday, May 17, 2018 - link
Primocache does the same thing.I've got an 80gig in my desktop, a 60 in an Asus laptop that has two 2.5 bays and a 16gig M.2 in my Inspiron 7559.
I don't use RAM as a buffer, just the SSD. Works great, unless you have an unstable system. Any time you lose power or don't shut down cleanly the cache resets. With the cache, however, my main box boots in about 20-30 seconds, all apps loaded, where as just running the mechanical drive a reboot is nearly a 4 minute affair.
lefty2 - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Ironically, these drives work better with AMD motherboards than Intel:https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardware/46145-amd-st...
CajunArson - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Where does Idiot-Zilla prove that Optane works "better" with AMD motherboards than Intel?But for a site that starts with "Fud" I will give them credit for dispelling the completely wrong "FUD" that is actually spread by AMD fanboys that Optane is a proprietary technology that only works with Intel products. Never has been proprietary.
philehidiot - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
"Fud" is also an excellent Scottish swear word. I particularly enjoy using it due to it's brutal bluntness.ianmills - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Intel was the one who claimed a coffee lake motherboard was needed for optane. Most likely the slow speed has to do with the spectre/meltdown fix that greatly slows down disk operations done in different user spaces on Intel chipsbananaforscale - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Oh but it *is* proprietary, you just don't know what the word means. Look it up. It *doesn*t* imply anything about compatibility.nevcairiel - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
All hardware really is, so the only argument anyone could reasonably make would be about the interface/compatibility when using that word.evernessince - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
No reason to buy with an AMD motherboard though, as AMD is handing out StoreMI for free with X470 boards. StoreMI is superior as well.Klimax - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Interesting lack of evidence...Dr. Swag - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Still don't see why a user should choose a 64gb optane drive over, say, a 500gb mx500, which you could use 64gb for caching using RST. The performance difference between optane and an mx500 won't be noticeable when doing normal stuff like booting up and launch apps.WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
There are a lot of folks who use their computers for more than just running Chrome and a few games. Many people with professional workflows have storage drives in the 4-8+ TB range but only need to work with ~50-100GB of data at a time. In these scenarios the active data will be automatically cached on the Optane drive and their workflows can be greatly accelerated without the need to copy it to a separate SSD scratch drive before working on it. If you have so little data that you can just run off of a 500GB SATA SSD then obviously just buy the MX500.iwod - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Surely the same can be done for SSD Boot Drive, this is more of a software advantage then a hardware advantage.CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You can use Optane drives like any SSD though. Even if these are being marketed as a caching only thing, you can still use it however you like. Want to pay less to try out software caching? Get the cheaper one then and try it out.TrackSmart - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
People seem to be talking around each other in these threads, without actually reading the substance of each person's reply.Dr. Swag didn't mention ONLY using a 500GB SSD. Just the opposite. He/she was suggesting that you could use a 500GB SSD for both a boot drive AND a 64GB cache drive. So you end up with ~440GB of normal SSD space (enough for most programs) AND a ~60GB cache drive to speed up your HDD accesses. All for the same price as adding a 64GB optane drive.
Addressing Dr. Swag's actual comment: I partially agree. One downside to the arrangement you suggested is that most affordable SSDs have lower write endurance than cache drives. They are also likely to be slower than an optane drive (but still fast compared to HDDs). And if your SSD boot/cache all-in-one drive dies, you might lose data on both the SSD and the HDD.
Regarding WithoutWeakness: Your comment makes sense if you are accessing the same subset of data over-and-over again. But if you are accessing a block of data ONCE to run an analysis and then moving onto a new block of data, then you will experience HDD speeds. Same goes for the first access to the data in cases where you will be using it multiple times. Slow the first time, faster in future times. So the downsides of a small cache will remain in a number of scenarios.
I personally think that Intel missed the boat with Optane. These solutions would have been a lot more convincing when SSD storage was a lot more expensive (i.e. 5+ years ago) and before other caching options existed for making use of 'normal' SSDs.
ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Power loss protection ?From what I know so far, the MX500 (500GB) cache contains unique data that has not yet been written to normal nand and Crucial does not recommend using an SLC cache unless you have battery backup protection
An Optane cache drive is a "copy" of data already on the hard drive (or SSD) and I don't see a problem with power loss resulting in data loss once you clear the cache
SkipPpe - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Something like an Intel 3510 would be a better drive to use for this.ಬುಲ್ವಿಂಕಲ್ ಜೆ ಮೂಸ್ - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
DOH......Nevermind!
sharath.naik - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
I was wondering if the lifespan of these are no better than SSD. wont this burn out much faster than the drives lifespan if used as a cache for it?MajGenRelativity - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Optane drives are more durable than the average SSDCheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Even more so than MLC NAND, which seems to be getting harder and harder to find (aside from Samsung's PRO line).Drumsticks - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Is anybody else interested in the performance of the 800p as a cache drive? The difference between an Optane SSD 800p and a 1TB HDD versus a 1TB SATA drive nowadays is less than $15, so it's pretty comparable for effectively the same capacity of storage. On the other hand, in the 25 or so graphs presented in this review, the 118GB caching solution outperforms a SATA drive, sometimes handily, in 24 of them. The 25th is power consumption, and one of them has a single loss in run 1 of the latency measurement for the heavy test.Hell, sometimes that solution outperforms the 900p. Why would you pick a comparably priced 1TB SATA SSD over something like that? If you need less storage, a 500GB will perform even worse than a 1TB, and a 250GB would be even worse still. Going down in capacity on the Optane drive would still probably keep you in the range of the SATA drive, while leaving you with double or quadruple the capacity.
Giroro - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
"58GB 800P is functionally identical to the 64GB M10 and both have the exact same usable capacity of 58,977,157,120 bytes."Hold on, either something is wrong or that is straight-up false advertisement, a new low that is far beyond how storage manufacturers usually inflate their capacity specs. Don't just breeze past the part where Intel may be illegally marketing this thing. As far as I know Optane doesn't use over-provisioning, and it definitely isn't the normal GiB/GB conversion issue or the typical "formatting" excuse that doesn't actually apply to solid state media, so what gives?
It has to be a mistake, right?
The_Assimilator - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
> it definitely isn't the normal GiB/GB conversion issueActually, it is.
jordanclock - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Yeah, 64GB is ~59GiB.IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Billy,Could you tell us why the performance is much lower? I was thinking Meltdown but 800P article says it has the patch enabled. The random performance here is 160MB/s for 800P, but on the other article it gets 600MB/s.
Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
The synthetic benchmarks in this review were all run under Windows so that they could be directly compared to results from the Windows-only caching drivers. My other reviews use Linux for the synthetic benchmarks. At the moment I'm not sure if the big performance disparity is due entirely to Windows limitations, or if there's some system tuning I could do to Windows to bring performance back up. My Linux testbed is set up to minimize OS overhead, but the Windows images used for this reivew were all stock out of the box settings.IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
What is used for the random tests? IOmeter?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
FIO version 3.6, Windows binaries from https://bluestop.org/fio/ (and Linux binaries compiled locally, for the other reviews). The only fio settings that had to change when moving the scripts from Linux to Windows was the ioengine option for selecting which APIs to use for IO. On Linux, QD1 tests are done with synchronous IO and higher queue depths with libaio, and on Windows all the queue depths used asynchronous IO.In this review I also didn't bother secure erasing the drives between running the burst and sustained tests, but that shouldn't matter much for these drives.
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
So looking at the original Optane Memory review, the loss must be due to Meltdown as it also gets 400MB/s.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
The Meltdown+Spectre workarounds don't have anywhere near this kind of impact on Linux, so I don't think that's a sufficient explanation for what's going on with this review's Windows results.Last year's Optane Memory review only did synthetic benchmarks of the drive as a standalone device, not in a caching configuration because the drivers only supported boot drive acceleration at that time.
IntelUser2000 - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
The strange performance may also explain why its sometimes faster in caching than when its standalone.Certainly the drive is capable of faster than that looking at raw media performance.
My point with the last review was that, whether its standalone or not, the drive on the Optane Memory review is getting ~400MB/s, while in this review its getting 160MB/s.
tuxRoller - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
As Billy said you're comparing the results from two different OSs'Intel999 - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Will there be a comparison between the uber expensive Intel approach to sped up boot times with AMD's free approach using StorageMI?Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Yes, but since my AMD system is a Threadripper, it won't actually represent any cost savings compared to the systems tested in this review.evernessince - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
AdoredTV already did a video showing the performance improvements from StoreMi.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3-SqJHYzC0
AMD's solution works in the same way, in that as you run programs it stores data to the cache drive. The big difference is AMD's solution let's you use any SSD as a cache drive. This means it can be any size and it doesn't require an addition purpose. This is especially important, give the huge price tag of the larger optane drives.
Speed wise though, assuming the Intel SSD is actually big enough to cache all your data, they are about equal. Of course, the AMD solution would be slower if you used a really low end SSD as your cache drive. It could also be much faster if you used a really good SSD though. The Intel optane drive has performance numbers similar to a 960 evo. The problem for Intel though are the small sizes and large prices. $200 for only 118GB of space is not a good solution. You could get double that space with a brand new 250GB 960 evo and it costs half as much. That's assuming you want to keep that drive for caching only, you could simply use your current SSD with the AMD solution and save $200+ altogether.
I simply don't see a universe where Optane makes sense.
CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You realize you can use Optane like any other SSD right? You can even use it with StorageMI.MDD1963 - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
There will be no tiny Optane things inserted into/wasting an M.2 NVME slot making it SEEM like I have a 960/970; there will be a 960/970. :)Valantar - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Any chance you could test one of these drives with AMD's new caching solution? AFAIK the drives show up as regular NVME devices, so it should work in theory. Would be really interesting to see these solutions compared, and if Ryzen or Threadripper can make proper use of Optane caching through third-party software.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
I'll be setting up a Threadripper system this week to test both caching and NVMe RAID.Lolimaster - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
My only use for an optane drive would be for swap file, firefox/chrome cache/install/profiles and GTA5.But a 500GB 860EVO cost $169 with 300TB of endurance vs 365TB on optane, with the 860 offering 4x the storage... dunno.
Their "low end" 118GB 800p needs to improve endurance to at least 1PB level to be a proper swapfile/browser/cache tool
evernessince - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
So what's the point of this when AMD is giving away StoreMi with it's X470 boards? From what I've seen from reviews of the product, it works exceptionally well. It also doesn't require you to buy another drive and it can use much larger SSDs as a cache.CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You can definitely ignore Intel's marketing pitch about these. But you can use ANY Optane drive, including ones mentioned here like ANY OTHER SSD out there. So you can make it work with StoreMi too. You have to decide which drive benefits your workload more and how and what your budget is. Optane has inherent benefits that beats out NAND is many ways. But again, just depends on what you want. The smaller GB ones are pretty damn cheap in my opinion. So worth just trying out.Svend Tveskæg - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Reminds me of back in the days, when you could buy a weird plastic screen, that claimed it would turn your black and white television into a color-TV....FunBunny2 - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
one of the distinguishing points, so to speak, of XPoint is its byte-addressable protocol. but I've found nothing about the advantages, or whether (it seems so) OS has to be (heavily?) modified to support such files. anyone know?Billy Tallis - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
The byte-addressability doesn't provide any direct advantages when the memory is put behind a block-oriented storage protocol like NVMe. But it does simplify the internal management the SSD needs to do, because modifying a chunk of data doesn't require re-writing other stuff that isn't changing. NVDIMMs will provide a more direct interface to 3D XPoint, and that's where the OS and applications need to be heavily modified.zodiacfml - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Quite impressive but for 32GB Optane drive, I can have a 250 GB SSD.The Optane might improve performance for fractions of a second over SSDs for applications but it won't help during program/driver installations or Windows updates which needs more speed.
I'd reconsider it for a 64 GB Optane as a boot drive for the current price of the 32GB.
RagnarAntonisen - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
You've got to feel for Intel. They spend a tonne of cash on projects like Larrabee, Itanium and Optane and the market and tech reviewers mostly respond with a shrug.And then everyone complains they're being complacent when it comes to CPU design. Mind you they clearly were - CPU performances increased at a glacial rate until AMD released a competitive product and then there was a big jump from 4 cores to 6 in mainstream CPUs with Coffee Lake. Still if the competition was so far behind you can afford to direct to R&D dollars to other areas.
Still it all seems a bit unfair - Intel get criticised when they try something new and when they don't.
And Itanium, Larrabee and Optane all looked like good ideas on paper. It was only when they had a product that it became clear that it wasn't competitive.
Adramtech - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
since when is a 1st or 2nd Gen product competitive? I'm sure if they don't have a path to reach competitiveness, the project will be scrapped.Keljian - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
While I don't doubt the tests are valid, I would really like to see a test with say PrimoCache - with the blocksize set to 4k. I have found in my own testing that Optane (with PrimoCache using optane as an L2 @ 4k) is very worthwhile even for my Samsung 950 pro.Keljian - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
https://hardforum.com/threads/intel-900p-optane-wo... - Here are my benchmark findings for the 850 evo and 950 pro using the 32gb optane as L2 cache. You'll notice the 4k speeds stand out.denywinarto - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
Thinking of using this with 12 tb hgst for a gamedisk drive for a ISCSI-based server, the data read is usually the same as they only game files. But occasionally new game gets added. Would it be a better option compared to raid? SSD are too expensive.Lolimaster - Monday, October 1, 2018 - link
Nice to use the 16GB as pagefile, chrome/firefox profile/cacheLolimaster - Tuesday, October 2, 2018 - link
It's better to use them as extra ram/pagefile or scratch disk.