How does Optane work...

[01001000 0110100]

I've heard how amazing it is to "boost" your HDD with Intel Optane and am thinking of buying one, and I saw a few videos (including one LTT made) but I can't seem to find out how to "install" it per say. Are there drivers I need to know about and install, do I need to wire the Optane and HDD in a special way or is it just a sort of plug and play thing?

[GoldenLag]

dont buy one

 

get an regular m.2 NVME SSD that is around 256 GB from Samsung or just a regular SSD that is about 250GB and buy a liscense with something like primocache.

 

 

its better, and it cheaper

 

 

 

its a very plug an play system, but id highly recommend avoiding optane as regular options of using software is much better or just having the two seperate. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

You need a 300 series or later (if there is a later) motherboard to start. So the Optane Memory system is basically useless for anyone that Intel tried to market it to.

[nosirrahx]

6 hours ago, 01001000 0110100 said:

I've heard how amazing it is to "boost" your HDD with Intel Optane and am thinking of buying one, and I saw a few videos (including one LTT made) but I can't seem to find out how to "install" it per say. Are there drivers I need to know about and install, do I need to wire the Optane and HDD in a special way or is it just a sort of plug and play thing?

Optane is not even close to plug and play. You need compatible hardware and a SATA drive that you want to accelerate. You then need to either install the Optane app or the RST software that includes Optane support.

There are a bunch of Optane modules that can be used for system acceleration ranging from 16GB (this one is terrible) to 118GB (this one is awesome but way too expensive).

The only use case I have ever seen for Optane that makes any sense at all is if you want 4TB of very fast storage. A cheap 4TB SSD cached to the 58GB 800P Optane drive is cheaper and faster than combining 2 2TB M.2 NVMe SDDs in RAID (there are no 4TB NVMe M.2 drives the last time I looked).

Currently I view Optane as a cool tech demo toy that is only good for a very few niche use cases. Optane and other similar technologies will eventually be right for most power users but we are not there yet.