Optain in servers

[Eskemo]

Are there any server motherboards that can use optain and would it be any cheaper to upgrade to a newer server motherboard and use hdds with optain instead of using ssd? Like hdds can still fail so can ssd. But if optain can speed up your computer for 75$ with a 200$ 4tb hdd. that would crazy cut costs instead of spending 1-1.5k on a ssd that's 4tb right? Obviously the write and read speed will be slower. But if you had a ssd with windows and a hdd in your server that'd would be pretty good right?

 

Tldr 

can you get server grade m/b that can use optain?

would it be worth it in a server or just for home use?

[tt2468]

Just home use. Servers are marketed to peoplewho have a large-ish budget. Optane is designed for low budget PCs.

 

And it's Optane, not Optain

[Daniel644]

unless you are accessing the same data each time I doubt you would see a huge improvement in access times, like say you have a BUNCH (like more then the capacity of the Optane module) of videos stored on the 4TB drive and you watch videos randomly Optane won't really make a difference there as it won't learn the pattern of what you access, Optane is for boosting application load times more then anything.

 

If you have an small SSD boot drive with your applications installed there and a 4TB for data (video) storage you really won't see any performance bumps, GAMES on the HDD, maybe, but not video.

[samiscool51]

it would be easier to setup a SSD RAID cache for HDD RAID array and get better performance and reliability than a optane SSD

[mariushm]

Optane is in small quantities (32-64 GB) and intended to be used as cache for mechanical hard drives, it has minimal benefits for SSDs.

Also as far as I know it only works on some Intel motherboards, with some specific chipsets, which don't support ECC or server processors.

 

On servers, you're supposed to use nvme / pci-e based SSD drives, you can plug a high end SSD or a SAS/SATA controller and have 8 or 16 lanes of pci-e v3.0 (8-16 GB/s in both directions) for your SSD or for a SSD raid array / bunch of drives.

 

If you want something cheaper than server processors, look at Ryzen ... Ryzen processors officially support ECC memory which is pretty much only thing that makes server cpus different these days (besides maybe being slightly less power hungry) so all you have to do is find a motherboard which doesn't disable the ECC support and you're done.

Pretty much all motherboards will also have a m.2 connector which is connected directly to cpu through a pci-e x4 link so you get 4 GB/s (32gbps) to the ssd in the m.2 connector.

Why spend money on an optane to accelerate a mechanical disk, when you can just go directly and buy a SSD with more capacity than the optane directly. You can then write the code of your website to store the most often used files on the SSD instead of letting the optane thing decide for you what's often used.

 

 

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

You can use optane modules in any server with pcie. For a nas just use a normal drive. Optane might be useful for some caches like for zfs. 

 

What is the full server?

[Jarsky]

9 hours ago, tt2468 said:

Just home use. Servers are marketed to peoplewho have a large-ish budget. Optane is designed for low budget PCs.

 

 

The P4800X begs to differ - its the first large Optane SSD, designed specifically for server/intensive applications.

 

Besides the high IOPS, the most amazing thing about it is the queue depths at which it reaches these high numbers. 

Additionally on Xeon systems, the P4800X can be integrated with the memory subsystem, i.e you can assign it as RAM. 

 

Though of course this is a lot more expensive than the $75 optane modules OP is talking about. 

 

[leadeater]

3 hours ago, Jarsky said:

The P4800X begs to differ - its the first large Optane SSD, designed specifically for server/intensive applications.

Pretty sure @tt2468 was intentionally leaving that out as I, and likely he, highly doubt anyone has the cash to buy one of those for home use . If anyone has brought one for home use then your insane lol.