Intel Optane Memory Vs M.2 PCIe SSD (Sammy 960)

[Appletax]

AM I CORRECT???

 

If you have a SATA SSD or HDD, you're max speed is 600 MB/s (SATA 6). Intel Optane's speed is probably > 3,000 MB/s... so you will notice a speed boost!

 

Intel Optane > SATA SSD (big performance boost)

Intel Optane >>> SATA HDD (biggest performance boost)

 

HOWEVER: If you have an M.2 PCIe SSD, such as the Samsung 960 Pro, you're getting 3,500 MB/s read & 2,100 MB/s YOU WILL RECEIVE NO BENEFIT BY USING AN INTEL OPTANE MEMORY STICK because the speeds are close.

 

Intel Optane = M.2 SSD (no performance boost)

 

Samsung 960 Pro + Intel Optane Memory = no difference in performance, boot times, application & game load times vs. Samsung 960 Pro by itself

 

***If you own an M.2 SSD and run games/apps off a SATA SSD or HDD, you will receive the benefits of Intel Optane Memory with the apps/games loaded from the SATA drives, but not those loaded from the M.2 SSD.

 

Edit: http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-memory-m2-cache-ssds-for-client-market

 

 

 

16GB = $44

32GB = $77

 

Edit 2:

 

The GTA V loading times with Intel Optane + HDD are very impressive.

 

Whatever apps/games you're loading from your SSD or HDD will get a performance boost from Intel Optane, but the apps & games you load from the M.2 SSD will not receive a performance boost.

So let's say I have an M.2 SSD and store my most frequently used games on it and also store a bunch of games on my SSD or HDD.

 

The games on the SSD or HDD will receive a performance boost, especially the ones stored on the HDD. However, the games stored in the M.2 SSD will receive no performance boost.

 

So, it could be useful to those who own an M.2 SSD.

[DocSwag]

First of all, sequential don't matter shit for boot up times and app launch times.

 

And if you look at Optane, the 16gb and 32gb drives only have 1200 MB/s read and 280 MB/s write.

 

It's been shown time and time again that for boot up times and app launch times high sequentials and even random speeds don't matter at all. Optane's main feature is lower latency compared to NAND, so I'm curious to see what it could actually change and whether or not boot up times or app launch times will change.

[Appletax]

[DocSwag]

If you need a source, Intel actually launched optane for the consumer today.

 

http://www.anandtech.com/show/11227/intel-launches-optane-memory-m2-cache-ssds-for-client-market

[DocSwag]

Wait a sec dude Linus just uploaded a video on optane... Time to watch and see some benchmarks!!!

[Appletax]

2 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

First of all, sequential don't matter shit for boot up times and app launch times.

 

And if you look at Optane, the 16gb and 32gb drives only have 1200 MB/s read and 280 MB/s write.

 

It's been shown time and time again that for boot up times and app launch times high sequentials and even random speeds don't matter at all. Optane's main feature is lower latency compared to NAND, so I'm curious to see what it could actually change and whether or not boot up times or app launch times will change.

So if I currently have a Samsung 960 Pro and toss in an Intel Optane Memory chip into my second M.2 slot, I will notice no increase in boot times nor in application loading times. And games won't load any faster.

 

If you own an M.2 drive it makes 0 sense to purchase Intel Optane Memory.

[DocSwag]

8 minutes ago, Appletax said:

So if I currently have a Samsung 960 Pro and toss in an Intel Optane Memory chip into my second M.2 slot, I will notice no increase in boot times nor in application loading times. And games won't load any faster.

 

If you own an M.2 drive it makes 0 sense to purchase Intel Optane Memory.

Not necessarily, we have to wait for benchmarks to say for certain.

[DocSwag]

As I said, for boot up times and app launch times sequentials and randoms don't mean shit for SSDs. Though it sucks that Intel decided linus should compare optane to an hdd. I don't think that's a good sign, and it's likely optane isn't that much better afterall.

[Appletax]

5 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

As I said, for boot up times and app launch times sequentials and randoms don't mean shit for SSDs. Though it sucks that Intel decided linus should compare optane to an hdd. I don't think that's a good sign, and it's likely optane isn't that much better afterall.

The GTA V loading times with Intel Optane + HDD are very impressive.

 

Whatever apps/games you're loading from your SSD or HDD will get a performance boost from Intel Optane, but the apps & games you load from the M.2 SSD will not receive a performance boost.

So let's say I have an M.2 SSD and store my most frequently used games on it and also store a bunch of games on my SSD or HDD.

 

The games on the SSD or HDD will receive a performance boost, especially the ones stored on the HDD. However, the games stored in the M.2 SSD will receive no performance boost.

 

So, it could be useful to those who own an M.2 SSD.

[DocSwag]

1 minute ago, Appletax said:

The GTA V loading times with Intel Optane + HDD are very impressive.

 

Whatever apps/games you're loading from your SSD or HDD will get a performance boost from Intel Optane, but the apps & games you load from the M.2 SSD will not receive a performance boost.

So let's say I have an M.2 SSD and store my most frequently used games on it and also store a bunch of games on my SSD or HDD.

 

The games on the SSD or HDD will receive a performance boost, especially the ones stored on the HDD. However, the games stored in the M.2 SSD will receive no performance boost.

 

So, it could be useful to those who own an M.2 SSD.

Not necessarily, you don't know that. Optane may be faster than an m.2 ssd.

[Appletax]

4 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

Not necessarily, you don't know that. Optane may be faster than an m.2 ssd.

Samsung 960 Pro = 3.5 GB/s

M.2 PCI-e 3.0 x4 = 3.9 GB/s max throughput

 

The Sammy 960 nearly saturates the M.2 bus, therefore there's very little room left to surpass the speeds of the Sammy 960.

 

The max speed of any M.2 SSD/Optane is 3.9 GB/s.

 

Bring on M.2 PCI-e 3.0 x8

[DocSwag]

Just now, Appletax said:

Samsung 960 Pro = 3.5 GB/s

M.2 PCI-e 3.0 x4 = 3.9 GB/s max throughput

 

The Sammy 960 nearly saturates the M.2 bus, therefore there's very little room left to surpass the speeds of the Sammy 960.

 

The max speed of any M.2 SSD/Optane is 3.9 GB/s.

But that's not necessarily what matters, and those are benchmark numbers, not real world ones.

 

If you RAID0 20 HDDs, you're gonna have a theoretical max read speed of around 4 GB/s. Is booting up the computer gonna be faster than even a cheap SSD? Probably not.

 

Because first of all, sequentials don't matter at all. Random reads and writes are more important.

 

And second of all, advertised speeds aren't real speeds. In real life, even a 960 pro only gets 1500 MB/s or so.

 

The reason why SSDs are way faster than HDDs is because of latency. Files get thrown all over the place in storage. With hard drives, you have to physically move the arm if you wanna go from one file to another. With an SSD, you don't have those issues. Latency goes down. Random reads and writes go up because of it. Performance improves.

 

Thats my guess as to why, when it comes to app launch times and boot times if you compare something like an 850 evo and 950 pro the difference will be less than 1%. Yes, you see a difference in large file transfers and such, but it doesn't matter for most users. That's because latency hasn't really improved much. Optane should be lower in latency, hence why I'm hopeful that we will get a noticeable storage performance jump for the consumer for the first time in years, but what Intel's done so far doesn't give me much hope.

[Appletax]

22 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

But that's not necessarily what matters, and those are benchmark numbers, not real world ones.

 

If you RAID0 20 HDDs, you're gonna have a theoretical max read speed of around 4 GB/s. Is booting up the computer gonna be faster than even a cheap SSD? Probably not.

 

Because first of all, sequentials don't matter at all. Random reads and writes are more important.

 

And second of all, advertised speeds aren't real speeds. In real life, even a 960 pro only gets 1500 MB/s or so.

 

The reason why SSDs are way faster than HDDs is because of latency. Files get thrown all over the place in storage. With hard drives, you have to physically move the arm if you wanna go from one file to another. With an SSD, you don't have those issues. Latency goes down. Random reads and writes go up because of it. Performance improves.

 

Thats my guess as to why, when it comes to app launch times and boot times if you compare something like an 850 evo and 950 pro the difference will be less than 1%. Yes, you see a difference in large file transfers and such, but it doesn't matter for most users. That's because latency hasn't really improved much. Optane should be lower in latency, hence why I'm hopeful that we will get a noticeable storage performance jump for the consumer for the first time in years, but what Intel's done so far doesn't give me much hope.

Excellent point on the latency.

 

Say the Sammy 960 & Intel Optane both have the same throughput of 3.5 GB/s, but the Optane has a faster latency/seek time. The Optane will "run" to the data faster.

 

Optane average latency = 0.006ms (read) & 0.016ms (write) *Hory sheet* !!! VROOOOM

 

HDD latency = ~16ms (slow AF)

 

 

Optane + Sammy 960 M.2 = little speed boost (maybe)

Optane + HDD = BIG speed boost (definitely)

 

Perhaps the goal is to eventually replace standard M.2 drives with Intel Optane drives. Rather have 1TB Optane than 1TB Sammy 960. Similar throughput, lower latency.
 

Perhaps Optane is not meant to replace M.2 drives.

[DocSwag]

9 hours ago, Appletax said:

Excellent point on the latency.

 

Say the Sammy 960 & Intel Optane both have the same throughput of 3.5 GB/s, but the Optane has a faster latency/seek time. The Optane will "run" to the data faster.

 

Optane average latency = 0.006ms (read) & 0.016ms (write) *Hory sheet* !!! VROOOOM

 

HDD latency = ~16ms (slow AF)

 

 

Optane + Sammy 960 M.2 = little speed boost (maybe)

Optane + HDD = BIG speed boost (definitely)

 

Perhaps the goal is to eventually replace standard M.2 drives with Intel Optane drives. Rather have 1TB Optane than 1TB Sammy 960. Similar throughput, lower latency.
 

Perhaps Optane is not meant to replace M.2 drives.

Exactly, and I think Intel is also looking at using it as a sort of non volatile DRAM. The difference in latency between DRAM and Optane is much smaller than between DRAM and NAND, though I think the main uses of Optane in this regard is probably in the enterprise market.

 

Yeah, I'm definitely still curious to see if Optane can give a performance jump, but it looks like Intel isn't too confident in it if they're comparing to HDDs.

 

Though that's interesting that NVMe does have a noticeable latency jump over SATA. I'm not too sure then why boot times and app launch times haven't improved. Weird.

[FloJo]

Got a question for all of you. Looking at this topic I see it mentioning that Intel Optane can be used in conjunction with another M.2 drive, and if someone tried that please tell me how you did it as I can’t make it work at all.

 

My system is an: Intel® Core™ i7-7700 Processor +  motherboard ASUS ROG STRIX Z270E GAMING _ ROG (2 x M.2 sockets capable of PCIe x4 both) + 32 GB RAM + a 4 TB WD Blue (as storage)

 

I have in my first M.2 socket an 960 EVO 500 GB that I boot my system from and my intention was to add in the second socket the Intel Optane 32 GB module to accelerate maybe the 960 EVO if possible (due to the low latency and good response in other areas ) or just make my storage 4TB WD to respond faster and/or just to improve my system overall as responsiveness.

 

My biggest, bad, surprise was that after I installed my Samsung 960 EVO with all drives, everything was working just fine, and at the end I wanted to add the intel Optane as a last step of system built, but the surprise came when I tried to install the intel software for Optane 32 GB module (SetupOptaneMemory.exe  - this is the software name). When I try to install this software that is from Intel website (that practically configures your Intel Optane to become a system boost from what they say) I start to receive errors saying that my BIOS config does not allow intel optane software to initialize and just force me to close it advising to contact INTEL CUSTOMER SUPPORT.

 

Also installing ( Intel Solid State Drive Toolbox )  downloaded and installed from intel web site again, it shows me that the Intel Optane 32 Gb Firmware is not the latest and should be updated, but in trying to do that with the soft offered by Intel (the toolbox) does not allow me to do that and greys out the button for updating the firmware. So, long story short, I can’t do it for some reason unknown to me.  

 

What I did next I contacted INTEL CUSTOMER SUPPORT and they came back to me with an answer that blew my mind as you can see below:

 

,, Greetings from Intel Customer Support.

Thank you for the information that you have provided. Upon checking here on my end, PCIe NVMe* drives are not supported for system acceleration.  You can check that information through this link. 

 

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory/000024018.html ’’

 

Again, the conclusion from what they say is that I can’t use the frakking Intel Optane 32 Gb for system boost if I have another m.2 SSD that is used to boot the system from?

 

Now I just use the Optane module as a simple 32 Gb storage SSD, it is very small as GB size and limited as usage,  but is very disappointing as this is not the reason that I have purchased this for.  

 

Looking on what you all wrote above I see mentioning that you managed to pair it with your first boot drive M.2 SSD (960 PRO), and if that is true is exactly the opposite of what the INTEL support team advice.

 

Can you tell me how you did it, what option in BIOS you activated or deactivated or can any of you help me integrate this Optane module into my systems and make it work as it was intended in the first place?

 

I find Intel team so far quite moronic and good for nothing in terms of helping solving a problem that they said should not be there in the first place and the software that they provide should do all this setup automatically, but the software stops right at the start and I do not know why and whatever I do in BIOS I can’t see to make it work. Also, I never saw mentioned in their literature that you can integrate/pair an Intel Optane with your first M.2 SSD boot drive.

 

Can any of you help with this problem or advice in any way?

 

Thank you all for you time.

 

[agent_x007]

You never saw it, because you can't.

Check under :

Quote

What is the complete list of software and hardware requirements for the Intel Optane Memory Series for system acceleration?

 

[FloJo]

I see it now. It is hidden pretty well this sh***t.

 

I cant believe that they didn't made this more evident and easier to be seen for people not to buy the wrong crap and understand where exactly you can use it .... 

 

And if that the case most likely I will take this garbage (Intel BUTANE) out and put on my second M.2 port another identical 960 EVO, make a RAID 0 and still be much faster than this Intel PROPANE garbage .... 

 

 

 

[antoniooninato]

On 6/22/2017 at 12:23 AM, FloJo said:

I see it now. It is hidden pretty well this sh***t.

 

I cant believe that they didn't made this more evident and easier to be seen for people not to buy the wrong crap and understand where exactly you can use it .... 

 

And if that the case most likely I will take this garbage (Intel BUTANE) out and put on my second M.2 port another identical 960 EVO, make a RAID 0 and still be much faster than this Intel PROPANE garbage .... 

 

 

 

sorry but I have to reply to this comment, the evo has a limited cache that it get fills then the drives get very slow after you copied just some gigs of data, 15 to 20 gigs should do it, so don't think the drive is throttling. I find out about this the hard way , I have thermal pads , cooling fans next to the drives so it wasn't a temperature problem , I don't know if you are aware of the new firmware problem with samsung 960 drives, I had two 16X M.2 cards with 4 samsung 960 EVO in each card, I went all the way up to 20,000 read and 10,000 write , I copy paste 60 gigs in 12 seconds but after that the performance drop because of the cache problem that I already explain, I returned both cards for a refund , sold most of my samsung drives on ebay because I spent over 2,000 just to find out about this problem, you might think just because you have thermal pads and fans the samsung drives will maintain the writing speed but that is not the case even if the drive is ice cold, trust me I been in the samsung forum, I think I will buy 2 of these cards, because I don't like the drop in performance after you write some gigs in Samsung 960 and after my bad experience I'm not going to buy the PRO to find out. sorry for the long post but in the past I had a raid card with 8 ssd's and the writing speed was consistent , I don't like that about samsung drives , you might think that 100 TB is a lot but after writing to the drives they will start to wear out fast then they will eventually die, the intel drive seems to have higher insurance and constant writing speed.

[ValkyrieStar]

On 08/01/2018 at 6:15 AM, antoniooninato said:

sorry but I have to reply to this comment, the evo has a limited cache that it get fills then the drives get very slow after you copied just some gigs of data, 15 to 20 gigs should do it, so don't think the drive is throttling. I find out about this the hard way , I have thermal pads , cooling fans next to the drives so it wasn't a temperature problem , I don't know if you are aware of the new firmware problem with samsung 960 drives, I had two 16X M.2 cards with 4 samsung 960 EVO in each card, I went all the way up to 20,000 read and 10,000 write , I copy paste 60 gigs in 12 seconds but after that the performance drop because of the cache problem that I already explain, I returned both cards for a refund , sold most of my samsung drives on ebay because I spent over 2,000 just to find out about this problem, you might think just because you have thermal pads and fans the samsung drives will maintain the writing speed but that is not the case even if the drive is ice cold, trust me I been in the samsung forum, I think I will buy 2 of these cards, because I don't like the drop in performance after you write some gigs in Samsung 960 and after my bad experience I'm not going to buy the PRO to find out. sorry for the long post but in the past I had a raid card with 8 ssd's and the writing speed was consistent , I don't like that about samsung drives , you might think that 100 TB is a lot but after writing to the drives they will start to wear out fast then they will eventually die, the intel drive seems to have higher insurance and constant writing speed.

The 960 EVO has the write cache, then drops to lower speed when it's full. The 960 PRO does not have the cache, and writes at full speed for the entirety of the drives capacity. I have both, and also a 950 PRO, which also does not have the cache. Only the EVO drives have the cache.