Should I get an Optane 800P 64GB as a boot drive?

[NunoLava1998]

I don't mind the low capacity and the price (124€), and ignoring sequential speeds (because those are literally irrelevant for boot drives as far as I know, please do correct me if I'm horribly misinformed fuck you AnandTech) it's about the same in 4K write as the 970 EVO and it's about 3x in 4K read compared to the 970 EVO (which is pretty significant). 970 EVO 250GB is about 39€ difference, and I don't need 250GB for a boot/programs drive (I have a separate SSD for games and large stuff, the OS drive is going to be used as purely a OS and programs drive).

Optane seems to be more adequate as a small boot drive because it uses 3D XPoint which doesn't slow down when you fill it up more, unlike regular SSDs

Also going to be putting my drive into a M.2 slot with direct connection to the CPU instead of the chipset

 

UserBenchMark (take a look at 4K speeds):

Spoiler

 

800P 64GB vs 970 EVO 250GB:

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-970-Evo-NVMe-PCIe-M2-250GB-vs-Intel-800p-NVMe-PCIe-M2-58GB/m494033vsm483445

800P 64GB vs 900P 280GB:

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-900P-Optane-NVMe-PCIe-280GB-vs-Intel-800p-NVMe-PCIe-M2-58GB/m315555vsm483445

800P 64GB vs similar SSD:

https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Patriot-Ignite-240GB-vs-Intel-800p-NVMe-PCIe-M2-58GB/3573vsm483445

 

CrystalDiskMark (take a look at 4K speeds, gets surpassed at about QD10 ish by other NVMes, but still close to most NVMes above ss that):

Spoiler

 From TheSSDReview

 From ProClockers: using CPU lanes (which is what I'm going to do)

 From HotHardware (christ those Read speeds...)

 AnandTech (This review is so biased for Optane I would not be surprised at all if they were paid by Intel)

Overall, seems like a pretty good boot drive. Seems better than NVMe in some areas (and about the same or slightly worse than NVMe in the areas it isn't better), and while the price per gigabyte is astronomically high and the capacity low, I don't mind paying the price lol

 

No TL;DR, read everything

TL;DR: Seems like a pretty good disk, but expensive af and low capacity, but I don't mind those two

[Dylanc1500]

I would say go for it. It will help with the responsiveness of the OS itself.

[NunoLava1998]

3 minutes ago, James Evens said:

Won't be any faster then a normal sata SSD. 

3d cross point matter for applications like databases not windows start up.

Windows startup is perfectly fine for me on a SSD, it's just that I prefer moving files/installing programs to be much faster, and the OS to be very responsive at all times. Plus I want a drive that holds up in the future (Optane has pretty high endurance and speeds but 64GB will probably be nothing in the future so there's that)

However yes, 3D XPoint was mostly made because of enterprise

2 minutes ago, Dylanc1500 said:

I would say go for it. It will help with the responsiveness of the OS itself.

Alright, going to wait for more opinions tho

[NineEyeRon]

I found very little difference going from a 500MBs SSD to a 1500 one. OS etc and startup all felt pretty much the same.

 

I would always say go for it if you have bought everything else and have some budget left but never if you have other components still to buy. Tackle your primary bottleneck first.

[NunoLava1998]

1 minute ago, NineEyeRon said:

I found very little difference going from a 500MBs SSD to a 1500 one. OS etc and startup all felt pretty much the same.

 

I would always say go for it if you have bought everything else and have some budget left but never if you have other components still to buy. Tackle your primary bottleneck first.

I do have everything else. What you're talking about is the sequential speeds, which for a OS drive as far as I know literally means jack shit (could be completely wrong though).

NVMe does seem to make a difference, but not if you buy shitty drives like the A1000

No bottleneck in my system and I'm pretty happy with my system for what I do (aka web browse a lot and every week play 20 minutes of Cities Skylines modded).

[mariushm]

No. 64 GB is too small for OS

What makes you think the OS does mostly 4K reads and writes making that statistic relevant?

 

Spend less on a bigger drive, and if you really want to maybe put the difference towards more ram - the OS will cache the files in ram and then the 4k reads and writes become irrelevant since the files are read from ram instead.

 

[NunoLava1998]

4 minutes ago, mariushm said:

No. 64 GB is too small for OS

What makes you think the OS does mostly 4K reads and writes making that statistic relevant?

 

Spend less on a bigger drive, and if you really want to maybe put the difference towards more ram - the OS will cache the files in ram and then the 4k reads and writes become irrelevant since the files are read from ram instead.

 

Windows 10 takes 9GB without the hibernation file (and even then it doesn't exceed 20GB), and I'm only storing the OS and programs there, not everything (even then I don't have a lot of stuff and my SSD rarely goes beyond 200GB filled).

 

About the 4K, most of the time OS and programs don't do many sequential reads and writes. I.e. when loading or reading something you're going to be looking at sequential, but when you're copying or moving a file, or extracting a file, you're going to be looking at 4K. Even if sequential was a majority of the stuff done, it still has pretty okay sequential speeds.