Intel Optane

[Greenbell7]

Hi, I'm planning on getting a Sinology NAS soon. Will this Intel Optane drive work on it and would it be a good solution if all I want is to use it a fast cache?

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1757288-REG/synology_diskstation_ds423_4_bay_nas.html

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06XSMTN31/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_2?smid=AE3YR9AX5P25J&psc=1

[AbydosOne]

1 minute ago, Greenbell7 said:

Hi, I'm planning on getting a Sinology NAS soon. Will this Intel Optane drive work on it and would it be a good solution if all I want is to use it a fast cache?

No, it is not a good solution.

 

Unless you're using >10G LAN, you won't need a cache. And 16GB of cache would be essentially pointless.

[cautiouslyoptimistic]

I have optane m10 16g, I don't anything like this, but only using it for storing OS, as it has impressive random access performance and crazy durability.

For NAS usecase, the connection limit is the network, much higher latency than PCIe, and so does not make sense vs larger (relative to 16gb, e.g. 120gb) SSD cache drive. In neither case will you get better random access, but larger SSD makes more sense for caching large transfers.

 

SSD became too cheap to justify Optane for consumer uses, 79 AUD 1TB Samsung SSD with DRAM is just far more flexible.

[cmndr]

On 6/9/2023 at 4:25 PM, AbydosOne said:

No, it is not a good solution.

 

Unless you're using >10G LAN, you won't need a cache. And 16GB of cache would be essentially pointless.

This isn't quite accurate. 

For small queue depth activities a HDD might pull UNDER 1MBPs.
4 HDDs together might end up pulling 3MBPs. 

 

If a small or mid-sized cache can handle 90-99% small operations you can literally get a 10-100x speed up in the worst case scenario. 

It's not a tiny difference. 

Now, to be fair, this won't matter much if all you're doing is streaming large blocks.