Help with Intel Optane memory

[Hussain_BH]

Hi,

 

I've always followed LTT forums and admired the community but i didn't sign up until now.

 

I'm looking for an advice/better ideas regarding an itx build.

 

I want to build a pc for the sole purpose of iPhone local backups for my parents, they'll use it for browsing and multimedia as well but very minimally. The internet speed where we live and the bandwidth is not particularly good for a full iPhone restore, i recently had to do a restore and it took nearly 3 days ! and consumed all my internet threshold.

 

Therefore i was pondering over this idea, an itx build so it will be really small, hook it up to the TV so it doesn't need a monitor, the igpu will be probably enough for browsing etc so no need for a dedicated gpu. So all i need is an itx case, itx motherboard, sfx psu, any decent cpu, couple of rams for dual channel and some storage.... and the storage is where i got stuck.

 

Phone storage keep getting larger and larger, half tera per phone now, so to be future proof and to have couple of backups i probably need like 4tb. And those 4tb SSDs are really expensive... like around 500 USD! 

 

Sow how about 4tb barracuda + Intel optane memory ? The problem is i have no experience with intel optane what so ever. Back then when they released intel optane i bought a 32gb one i think, but i'm not sure if they are a success or have many problems and will not be stable. Now i see what looks like a newer H10 version, which seems like it was made for laptops only ? And i'm not sure the old one i have support any size of hdd, i did a little research but didn't find a clear answers.

 

Any knowledge/advice will be highly appreciated.

 

Thank you.

[porina]

My opinion, get a SSD for the OS drive, and the 4TB (or whatever capacity you decide on) HD for the backup, but no Optane. Just use it as a regular HD. Avoid the shingled drives that caused a fuss earlier in the year. If possible, a 7200rpm one might make it a bit less slow. 

 

Optane Memory is rather too small to help improve performance in this use case. Your data set is much bigger than it, so you're going to be limited by the HD anyway.

[Kilrah]

No point in optane indeed, just get a large HDD and maybe a small SSD boot drive, but if that's all it's going to be used for it's not even really important.

 

Neither is dual channel. 

[Hussain_BH]

Thanks for the prompt reply guys. i thought about SSD for boot only of course. but :

1- What i know of is iTunes should be installed on the c drive, and i did a little research and didn't find an easy way to force iTunes to save the back up on another drive (nor does it have an option to choose where the backup goes to)

2- Didn't want to confuse my parents (that's why i mentioned what it will be used for). In similar situations i noticed that people get confused and not know why their pc is full (most save everything on desktop), simply because they don't grasp the idea of boot drive and data drive, or simply because they forget.

 

I thought about intel optane because it might solve these problems for me, there will be only one large drive, it will be accelerated to a speed that is similar to an ssd, no problem with iTunes or with filling up the boot drive.

 

1 hour ago, porina said:

Optane Memory is rather too small to help improve performance in this use case

I'm not sure i get this one, i thought that Intel Optane only cache the most used files and apps, that's how it accelerates,  so it shouldn't matter how big the HDD is. I might be wrong though 

[porina]

42 minutes ago, Hussain_BH said:

I'm not sure i get this one, i thought that Intel Optane only cache the most used files and apps, that's how it accelerates,  so it shouldn't matter how big the HDD is. I might be wrong though 

It is that the Optane is small that's the problem, regardless of the HD size. How big is Windows? Some tens of GB. How big is a game? Depends on game of course, but they range into the tens of GB each. Optane can only speed up what it is stored there. Who knows which files it has, but unless you only play one game repeatedly, it just can't hold a lot in that cache. And if the data isn't in the cache, you're at HD speeds.

 

Now that the scenario has been described more, there is another option that might work in this use case. Primocache software plus a large regular SSD as cache. By large, I'd aim for 480GB or more. At least that way it has a much better chance of keeping what you need on it than the smaller Optane modules. Primocache works in a similar way to Optane, but doesn't have the Intel requirements. Note I haven't actually used it myself, but gets mentioned occasionally by Linus amongst others.

[Kilrah]

8 hours ago, Hussain_BH said:

1- What i know of is iTunes should be installed on the c drive, and i did a little research and didn't find an easy way to force iTunes to save the back up on another drive (nor does it have an option to choose where the backup goes to)

I use an NTFS juntion to redirect the iTunes backup folder to my data drive.

https://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

 

[Hussain_BH]

Very helpful stuff guys 

I think i'll give primocache a shot

Thank you all for your help