should i get optane

[exbass]

i have and 960 evo 250 gb but i use platter drives for bulk storage like games and music but i want faster load speeds. should i just get optane to speed up my hdds (im planning on getting one more) or a samsung 860 evo just to install games on not hold the image i've used up a little over half of my seagate barracuda 7200rpm drive 2tb and i currently have games installed on it so optane vs ssd? also i have 270 kaby lake.

[Enderman]

No, optane cache is a horrible idea (unless you need the standalone optane SSDs)

Just get a regular sata SSD (the 860 evos are super cheap) and put your games and files there.

[exbass]

ok thank

 

[DarthSmartt]

Generally Hdds are fast enough for loading games but if you must have something faster, pick up the dirt cheap ssds on amazon. Optane is a waste of money for any application.

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Enderman said:

No, optane cache is a horrible idea (unless you need the standalone optane SSDs)

Just get a regular sata SSD (the 860 evos are super cheap) and put your games and files there.

Its not a bad caching solution, the algro seems to work better than most others, and is pretty easy to setup a use. Nothing really wrong with it. For the price of those modules(there like 25 bucks on amazon) its really not a bad upgrade that will load games a good amount faster.

[exbass]

its really just to install games on i use platter drives for raw storage i just want faster load speeds for games i have mods for like fallout 4

[exbass]

ill get a evo 860 for now then when optane matures a little bit i  might go with it.

[Enderman]

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Its not a bad caching solution, the algro seems to work better than most others, and is pretty easy to setup a use. Nothing really wrong with it. For the price of those modules(there like 25 bucks on amazon) its really not a bad upgrade that will load games a good amount faster.

No, it's bad.

 

Iinstead of you choosing what gets sped up it chooses itself.

That means the first time you open something it is not going to be any faster.

It then has to copy over data from the HDD over to the SSD cache.

If you then open a different program it's slow all over again, and it then has to do the above again.

So the only time it really is of any benefit is when you repeatedly use the same programs, in which case you could have literally just manually put those programs on a regular SSD.

 

In the end you have excessive drive activity as the algorithm writes data back and forth between the HDD and SSD, wearing down both more than if you simply left the data static on a separate HDD and SSD.

Also if you try accessing data on the HDD while the algorithm is copying to or from the cache it will be SLOWER than even a plain HDD due to the drive already being in use.

 

Overall it's literally just adding a secondary cache to the primary cache on the drive, which has to operate through sata instead of being directly incorporated on the drive.

A very small amount of space that will increase drive usage and wear, not let you choose what gets sped up, and sometimes slow things down too.

 

So yeah, waste of money.

Save up and buy a proper SSD and pick what goes on it manually.

[JoostinOnline]

19 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Just get a regular sata SSD (the 860 evos are super cheap) and put your games and files there. 

Quadruple the price of a hard drive isn't super cheap. It may not be a financial issue for you personally, but it is for a lot of people.

 

@Op If you're looking to speed up your load times but can't afford a full SSD, then using PrimoCache and a smaller SSD may be a good middle ground. It's not quite as good as a single SSD, but it doesn't require a special chipset and it's cheaper than Optane.

[Enderman]

8 minutes ago, JoostinOnline said:

Quadruple the price of a hard drive isn't super cheap. It may not be a financial issue for you personally, but it is for a lot of people.

A 1TB SSD is $150, that's only twice the price of a decent hard drive.

Also unless you have hundreds of games there is no need for a huge SSD.

Something like 250 or 500GB is enough, and just don't store thousands of games that you don't ever play on your computer.

 

Also OP was considering buying optane so obviously he can afford more than a potato.

An 860 evo 250GB is about the same price as an optane 32GB, and gets you like 8x more storage.

So who's got the good price per capacity now, huh?

 

There's this really cool thing called 'steam' that remembers what games you own and you can download them at any time, so you don't need to store all of them at once on your PC. You only need to store the ones you regularly play.

 

Also keep in mind that a cache drive for an HDD does not speed up the entire HDD, it can only speed up the same amount of data as it's capacity.

So essentially it's 32GB of fast storage vs 250GB of fast storage, for THE SAME PRICE.

I don't know about you, but it's pretty obvious to me which one is more worthwhile, especially if you are tight on money.

[exbass]

yea ima just get a samsung evo either the 500 gb or the 1tb

[Electronics Wizardy]

44 minutes ago, Enderman said:

No, it's bad.

 

Iinstead of you choosing what gets sped up it chooses itself.

That means the first time you open something it is not going to be any faster.

It then has to copy over data from the HDD over to the SSD cache.

If you then open a different program it's slow all over again, and it then has to do the above again.

So the only time it really is of any benefit is when you repeatedly use the same programs, in which case you could have literally just manually put those programs on a regular SSD.

 

In the end you have excessive drive activity as the algorithm writes data back and forth between the HDD and SSD, wearing down both more than if you simply left the data static on a separate HDD and SSD.

Also if you try accessing data on the HDD while the algorithm is copying to or from the cache it will be SLOWER than even a plain HDD due to the drive already being in use.

 

Overall it's literally just adding a secondary cache to the primary cache on the drive, which has to operate through sata instead of being directly incorporated on the drive.

A very small amount of space that will increase drive usage and wear, not let you choose what gets sped up, and sometimes slow things down too.

 

So yeah, waste of money.

Save up and buy a proper SSD and pick what goes on it manually.

Have you seen this test ? https://www.anandtech.com/show/12748/the-intel-optane-memory-m10-64gb-review-optane-caching-refreshed/4

 

The data set is about 100gb, and the cache is still much faster on the first run.

 

The data used on most systems is pretty predictable. Its much easier to have a cache manage where the data is for things like games than having to manually manage it for your self.

 

The tests with optane was always faster than the hdd alone, buy a good amount.

 

For the price you really can't beat the improvement its giving you. Its much cheaper than a large ssd, so you might as well get one for the hdd, you can use it in addition to a large ssd aswell for the most commonly used drives, but for a game drive, you really can't beat the optane + hdd combo for the price. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

53 minutes ago, exbass said:

ill get a evo 860 for now then when optane matures a little bit i  might go with it.

You might as well give it a try, the 16gb optane ssds are like 25 bucks and you can return it if it doesn't work well. Its much cheaper than a large nand ssd, and will still give a good boost in speed.

[exbass]

yea i have the money for either or so im ajust get the ssd becasue if i fill up my other m.2 slot it wipes out two of my sata ports and im already using an m.2 slot soooo i dont wann use all stat ports

[exbass]

plus i need a blue ray burner so ive used two slots plus using the m.2 slot i already have it use's sata slot 1 and 5

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, exbass said:

yea i have the money for either or so im ajust get the ssd becasue if i fill up my other m.2 slot it wipes out two of my sata ports and im already using an m.2 slot soooo i dont wann use all stat ports

If you have the money go for it, its the normally faster solution. Just saying you can easily add sata ports and m.2 ports with pcie cards.

[exbass]

i was planing on getting a jbod card but i want the sound blaster zxr flagship so i can hook up my thirty pound bluetooth speaker to my computer adn with my video card covering one pci express slot that gives me to and my mobo came with a wireless wifi?bluetooth card so that in one of them

[exbass]

wifi/bluetooth

[Enderman]

15 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Have you seen this test ? https://www.anandtech.com/show/12748/the-intel-optane-memory-m10-64gb-review-optane-caching-refreshed/4

 

The data set is about 100gb, and the cache is still much faster on the first run.

 

The data used on most systems is pretty predictable. Its much easier to have a cache manage where the data is for things like games than having to manually manage it for your self.

 

The tests with optane was always faster than the hdd alone, buy a good amount.

 

For the price you really can't beat the improvement its giving you. Its much cheaper than a large ssd, so you might as well get one for the hdd, you can use it in addition to a large ssd aswell for the most commonly used drives, but for a game drive, you really can't beat the optane + hdd combo for the price. 

1) The "first run" is after the data has been loaded into cache.

It is impossible for the hard drive to be sped up magically without the data in the cache.

 

2) Those are also jsut benchmarks, in a real world scenario where you may be opening multiple files and running programs/games if you access the hard drive while the cache algorithm is reading/writing to it then it will be slower.

 

3) The tests are designed to show the improvement of optane. If you try to access something which is not on the cache (aka 90% of the other data on the HDD) then it will nt be sped up at all.

 

4) As I pointed out earlier, for the price/GB it is literally the worst investment you could make. For the same price you can get 8x more SSD storage.

 

5) It is not hard to "manage it yourself" you literally choose where to install or download your files. Oh, you access documents a lot? stick it on the SSD. Oh you don't play this game much? Install it on the HDD. It is easy, and much better than "I'll let this piece of shit code guess what I want to use next! Hopefully I get fast speeds!"

[Electronics Wizardy]

5 minutes ago, Enderman said:

1) The "first run" is after the data has been loaded into cache.

It is impossible for the hard drive to be sped up magically without the data in the cache.

 

2) Those are also jsut benchmarks, in a real world scenario where you may be opening multiple files and running programs/games if you access the hard drive while the cache algorithm is reading/writing to it then it will be slower.

 

3) The tests are designed to show the improvement of optane. If you try to access something which is not on the cache (aka 90% of the other data on the HDD) then it will nt be sped up at all.

 

4) As I pointed out earlier, for the price/GB it is literally the worst investment you could make. For the same price you can get 8x more SSD storage.

 

5) It is not hard to "manage it yourself" you literally choose where to install or download your files. Oh, you access documents a lot? stick it on the SSD. Oh you don't play this game much? Install it on the HDD. It is easy, and much better than "I'll let this piece of shit code guess what I want to use next! Hopefully I get fast speeds!"

1. Yea, but the data loaded on the drive is bigger than the cache, it doesn't know what will be used from that 100gb and still does much better than the hdd

 

2. Then look at tests of game load times, there a good amount better than just a hdd.

 

3. But thats how real world data is used, you don't randomly access files, a few files are used a lots, and most aren't used much at all.

 

4. How? 4 tb hdd is about 100 + 16gb optane ssd for 25 = 125, 4 tb ssd is about 600, thats a much better value.

 

5. But then you have to move a file before you use it, wasting time. Its gonna be quicker to just let the system load it into the cache the first time its used. Copying games between games can take a while. Esp when you want a game to load fast that isn't played that often.

[Enderman]

11 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

1. Yea, but the data loaded on the drive is bigger than the cache, it doesn't know what will be used from that 100gb and still does much better than the hdd

 

2. Then look at tests of game load times, there a good amount better than just a hdd.

 

3. But thats how real world data is used, you don't randomly access files, a few files are used a lots, and most aren't used much at all.

 

4. How? 4 tb hdd is about 100 + 16gb optane ssd for 25 = 125, 4 tb ssd is about 600, thats a much better value.

 

5. But then you have to move a file before you use it, wasting time. Its gonna be quicker to just let the system load it into the cache the first time its used. Copying games between games can take a while. Esp when you want a game to load fast that isn't played that often.

1) Only when the data accesses is on the cache. Not for the other 90% of the data.

 

2) Again, only when it's on the cache.

 

3) Uh, idk about you, but I access most of my files regularly. That's why they are on SSDs. The files I almost never access are on an HDD and I would be severely annoyed if just because I want to look at an old file once it has to take an often used file out of the high speed storage to make space for this file I only want to see once.

That's what sucks about cache drives.

 

4) only 16GB are actually fast, not the whole HDD. 32GB vs 250GB, a regular SSD is much better value for the same price. Again, nobody needs 4TB of games, there's no point in buying a 4TB SSD, you only need 250-1000GB depending on how organized you are.

 

5) No you don't, you literally choose where you install or download a file the first time and that's it. You would have to do this anyway regardless of how many drives you have. If you're loading a game that isn't played often it will not be fast with optane anyway, because the algorithm does not magically see the future of what you're going to want to play tomorrow. It is based on your past actions.

[exbass]

enderman i have over a tb and ahlf of games

[JoostinOnline]

4 hours ago, Enderman said:

A 1TB SSD is $150, that's only twice the price of a decent hard drive.

Also unless you have hundreds of games there is no need for a huge SSD.

Something like 250 or 500GB is enough, and just don't store thousands of games that you don't ever play on your computer.

 

Also OP was considering buying optane so obviously he can afford more than a potato.

An 860 evo 250GB is about the same price as an optane 32GB, and gets you like 8x more storage.

So who's got the good price per capacity now, huh?

 

There's this really cool thing called 'steam' that remembers what games you own and you can download them at any time, so you don't need to store all of them at once on your PC. You only need to store the ones you regularly play.

 

Also keep in mind that a cache drive for an HDD does not speed up the entire HDD, it can only speed up the same amount of data as it's capacity.

So essentially it's 32GB of fast storage vs 250GB of fast storage, for THE SAME PRICE.

I don't know about you, but it's pretty obvious to me which one is more worthwhile, especially if you are tight on money.

A good hard drive is $45.  And you've got some aggression issues.

 

I was only trying to offer a more affordable option, while making it clear that yours was the better performer. I never recommended Optane either.

[JoostinOnline]

3 hours ago, exbass said:

enderman i have over a tb and ahlf of games

You need to use the @ symbol to tag someone.

 

If you go the full SSD route, you can just move the files back and forth depending on what you're playing. If you pair PrimoCache with a decent 250GB SSD, it will cost you around $70 but should be sufficient to cache everything. I've used PrimoCache and it's quite good at only caching small (but frequently accessed) files to massively improve load times.

 

If you're interested, Linus talked about it in a video awhile back. Jump to about 7 minutes in for them to get to PrimoCache: