Optane cache for NVMe SSD boot drive

[Freddy117]

Hi,

thanks to the abundance of Optane M10 16gb on eBay I bought 4 and plan to use them as boot drive cache for my rig update. I'm not sure which of the SSDs I have makes most sense to use Optane with and in what configuration on the board.

I have a Samsung 980 Pro (1Tb) and an old Gigabyte Aorus PCIe 4th Gen from 2019 (so not the current Gigabyte model). The Optane modules will be sitting on a PCIe 8x (4th Gen) expansion card with 4x M.2 slots. Mainboard is an X570 AORUS ULTRA (rev. 1.0).

 

My current plan is to slot the 980 pro on the top M.2 slot (CPU bound) and use it as a game drive. Then put the Gigabyte SSD on the second M.2 slot (chipset bound) and the expansion card for the 4 Optane modules on the PCIe8x below the GPU.

 

My goal is to have the snappiest Windows experience possible while still using the strength of the individual components. I'm generally not impressed with the Gigabyte SSD, running CrystalDiskMark 8 Real World Performance benchmark it gets beat by my 970evo plus in 4k read and latency. So I figured I would use Optane cache with the "slower" SSD as a boot drive, assuming that the result would be very similar to using the 980 pro with Optane cache as a boot drive and thereby not wasting the already very good latency and 4k read values of the 980 pro.

 

Thoughts? Does it make sense to use the Gigabyte SSD as a boot drive in this configuration or should I use the 980 pro instead?

 

Other system specs are:

Ryzen 5800x

X570 AORUS ULTRA (rev. 1.0)

64gb 3600Mhz RAM

 

I plan on using PrimoCache for Optane caching and experiment with L1 RAM caching, hence the over sized RAM. 

[jaslion]

But why?

 

Between a mx500 or a 980pro windows will basically run the same. Windows on raw optane does the same too. It's not storage bottlenecked it's literally software bottlenecked.

[porina]

My suggestion: don't bother, at least not with Intel's software. Optane in this way is quite small and does add an additional layer to go wrong. I also found it reduced write speeds vs native SSD when I tried it in the past. I have no experience with Primocache so don't know if it'll work better. For sure I would not want to do it to 980 Pro which is already a top tier SSD. The other, may be worth a try but again I wouldn't bother.

 

34 minutes ago, jaslion said:

Between a mx500 or a 980pro windows will basically run the same. Windows on raw optane does the same too. It's not storage bottlenecked it's literally software bottlenecked.

There is one area I found in Windows that scales somewhat with SSD performance: Windows Updates. It is painfully slow if you use bottom tier SSDs like WD Green, Kingston A400 and other low end ones. In the upper tiers WU is much faster. And yes, I'm sure it is not CPU limiting.

[Freddy117]

Well, that's a bit disappointing, but thanks for your comments

 

47 minutes ago, jaslion said:

But why?

 

I saw on an LTT video that Optane is dirt cheap right now so I figured I'd waste 40€ to get to experience the tech

[jaslion]

10 minutes ago, porina said:

There is one area I found in Windows that scales somewhat with SSD performance: Windows Updates. It is painfully slow if you use bottom tier SSDs like WD Green, Kingston A400 and other low end ones. In the upper tiers WU is much faster. And yes, I'm sure it is not CPU limiting.

Oh yeah thats due to their slow flash storage and lack of a cache sata drives that do not have this go very fast too.

[Blue4130]

3 hours ago, Freddy117 said:

). The Optane modules will be sitting on a PCIe 8x (4th Gen) expansion card with 4x M.2 slots. Mainboard is an X570 AORUS ULTRA (rev. 1.0).

 

... the expansion card for the 4 Optane modules on the PCIe8x below the GPU.

I am pretty sure that when you do this, you will see that 2 optane drives are missing. Each one needs 4 lanes. Unless you get a rather expensive card with a plx Pci-e switch, you won't have enough lanes.