Intel Optane Review

[nicklmg]

Buy Intel Optane on Amazon: http://geni.us/EmZjLN4

 

Are Intel's new Optane caching drives a worthwhile purchase if you already have an SSD?

 

 

[ProjectBox153]

I've heard of this, but I guess I will have to watch to see what it is about. 

[LienusLateTips]

I have that case...

[ARikozuM]

Here we go with the "this only fits X use cases"...

[idmb]

So we saw how it works with a low end SSD, what if you use it with a 960  Pro setup?  

 

What about benchmarks of "$150 SSD + $40 optane vs $190 SSD" etc?  

[Himommies]

The sad part is this is the only reason to get Kaby lake

[RadiatingLight]

Just now, Himommies said:

The sad part is this is the only reason to get Kaby lake

Higher overclocking capability and clockspeeds?

 

[Himommies]

Just now, RadiatingLight said:

Higher overclocking capability and clockspeeds?

 

Not by that much

[Enderman]

Can't wait for the full SSDs to be released.

Seems like it will be much better than the NVME samsung drives.

[gonvres]

Everyone seems to hate this octane upgrade, but to me it makes a lot of sense.

 

Its not for those of us with a SSD and a HDD, its for building a box for your 70 year old mother. She doesn't want to think about multiple hard drives, yet this will give her SSD like performance when you can still have a mechanical 1tb drive to store all of the stuff.

I think its a great idea. A small performance decrease for the enthusiast means a lot less drive management for the mainstream customers.

 

1tb storage drive + cheap octane memory is still cheaper than a 1tb storage drive + 256gb SSD.

[ARikozuM]

4 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Can't wait for the full SSDs to be released.

Seems like it will be much better than the NVME samsung drives.

If there's a midnight launch at Intel, I'm there. 

[RadiatingLight]

10 minutes ago, Himommies said:

Not by that much

Well skylake can't reach 5Ghz on air. usually not even close. 500Mhz boost in OC is pretty significant IMO

[Orangeator]

3 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

500Mhz boost in OC is pretty significant IMO

500Mhz isn't just significant in your opinion... It is significant, it is a massive overclock lol.

[captain_to_fire]

It would be interesting if they tested the Intel Optane memory with a zippy M.2 NVM express SSD like the Samsung 960 Evo/Pro but that could've been overkill already.

[antoipod]

I just buy an i5 6600k  instead of an i5 7600k to save some money then learn Optane is not some extremely expensive enthusiast memory. 

[Razor512]

Why can't they just make the chipset support DDR3 RAM so that users building a DDR4 based system, can re-use their old DDR3 RAM to make a dedicated RAM disk. It can then be used as a read cache but not a write cache, or work as a massive read ahead where for example if you launch a game, spare resources are then spent loading more of the game data into the cache.

 

Another benefit can be after a system bootup, commonly used applications are then duplicated into the DDR3 modules using unused CPU time.

 

The system can even have a shutdown state where the DDR3 modules are kept in a low power state to retain their content, thus some retention when the system is powered "off" but no big deal if it is unplugged.

[ARikozuM]

1 minute ago, Razor512 said:

Why can't they just make the chipset support DDR3 RAM so that users building a DDR4 based system, can re-use their old DDR3 RAM to make a dedicated RAM disk. It can then be used as a read cache but not a write cache, or work as a massive read ahead where for example if you launch a game, spare resources are then spent loading more of the game data into the cache.

Look at the size of the Optane module compared to DDR modules. You don't want a cache that purges itself when powered off and takes a ton of space on the board. Also, the XPoint memory is apparently cheaper to produce compared to DDR according to Intel.

[Razor512]

Just now, ARikozuM said:

Look at the size of the Optane module compared to DDR modules. You don't want a cache that purges itself when powered off and takes a ton of space on the board. Also, the XPoint memory is apparently cheaper to produce compared to DDR according to Intel.

My idea was more of something targeted at re-using components that many users may have laying around, e.g., how many users here, have a PC that uses DDR4 RAM as well as an older system or motherboard that also had some DDR3 RAM. What if with a new PC build, you could recycle more components from the old build in order to accelerate the new one?

 

For example, you build a new PC with 32GB of DDR4 , but you take the 16GB of DDR3 from your old system, and use it for caching in the new one. it may not hit the 20-30GB/s that they are capable of, but it can be tuned for as low of a latency as possible, and used to accelerate the SSD.

[Razor512]

Also wanted to add, since it is also possible to learn use habits (in the event of power loss), after a bootup (if the system was unplugged after shutting down, it could spend any idle time the system has in order to fill that 16GB cache, which should not take long with modern SSDs

 

For example, with a SATA SSD, it just has to find a cumulative 28-30 seconds of idle time to fill the RAM cache, or with an NVMe SSD system, find  about 4 seconds worth of cumulative idle time to fill the cache.

[Daniel644]

1 hour ago, gonvres said:

Everyone seems to hate this octane upgrade, but to me it makes a lot of sense.

 

Its not for those of us with a SSD and a HDD, its for building a box for your 70 year old mother. She doesn't want to think about multiple hard drives, yet this will give her SSD like performance when you can still have a mechanical 1tb drive to store all of the stuff.

I think its a great idea. A small performance decrease for the enthusiast means a lot less drive management for the mainstream customers.

 

1tb storage drive + cheap octane memory is still cheaper than a 1tb storage drive + 256gb SSD.

70 year old mothers don't NEED massive amounts of storage, her computer is some 10 year old piece of crap Dell running Vista with a 250GB HDD that only has 20GB of crap on it (including the OS), the 128GB SSD's are plenty large enough to hold her family photos, because lets be real ALL she does is browse the web and if the web isn't working she says her COMPUTER isn't working because she doesn't understand the difference between the internet and the computer.

[phych]

Can you use the optane disk as a regular drive? I am considering getting one for the sake of running a Minecraft server from it.

[Angus Wu]

Will it operate with a M.2 NVME SSD boot drive (OS) and only optane the my 4tb HDD. So basically an NVME ssd boot drive + an excellerated HDD?

[Daniel644]

27 minutes ago, phych said:

Can you use the optane disk as a regular drive? I am considering getting one for the sake of running a Minecraft server from it.

not with the currently available stuff, but Optane based SSD's are coming at some point.

[ARikozuM]

37 minutes ago, Angus Wu said:

Will it operate with a M.2 NVME SSD boot drive (OS) and only optane the my 4tb HDD. So basically an NVME ssd boot drive + an excellerated HDD?

Yes, it will, though you can always use RST.

[gonvres]

53 minutes ago, Daniel644 said:

70 year old mothers don't NEED massive amounts of storage, her computer is some 10 year old piece of crap Dell running Vista with a 250GB HDD that only has 20GB of crap on it (including the OS), the 128GB SSD's are plenty large enough to hold her family photos, because lets be real ALL she does is browse the web and if the web isn't working she says her COMPUTER isn't working because she doesn't understand the difference between the internet and the computer.

 

Maybe in that instance I agree.

 

However there is another example. I built a system for my brother a year ago, a 256gb/2tb storage setup because he said he absolutely had to have a lot of storage space. He put everything on the 256gb drive, filled it up, then complained it was out of storage. 

 

He has no idea how to manage what data goes on what drive. 

 

There are no doubt more like him.