Optane vs Samsung RAPID

[Ja50n]

I’m curious how Optane performance compares to Samsung’s RAPID RAM caching technology. Optane caches the boot drive with much faster m.2 3D XPoint storage in either 16 or 32 GB sticks, while RAPID uses a chunk of system memory. Optane is only compatible with Windows 10 and Intel 7th or 8th gens, making it untestable for me, while RAPID works fine with my 2600K and Ryzen systems.

 

I would like to know how well the price premium of Optane translates into real world performance gains vs the essentially free (with purchase of a recent Samsung SSD) RAPID mode. Also, can both be enabled simultaneously for even better performance?

[Enderman]

Caching is dumb and a waste of time.

Don't use Optane, just use a regular SSD.

Don't use RAPID either.

If you really need more speed for whatever you do in your job then buy an NVME drive, otherwise use your ram the way it is meant to be used.

[Berget]

17 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Caching is dumb and a waste of time.

Don't use Optane, just use a regular SSD.

Don't use RAPID either.

If you really need more speed for whatever you do in your job then buy an NVME drive, otherwise use your ram the way it is meant to be used.

It has some use cases

[Ja50n]

16 minutes ago, Enderman said:

Caching is dumb and a waste of time.

Don't use Optane, just use a regular SSD.

Don't use RAPID either.

If you really need more speed for whatever you do in your job then buy an NVME drive, otherwise use your ram the way it is meant to be used.

The point wasn’t practicality, it was wanting to know how their performance compares. I want numbers, just calling something dumb isn’t nearly quantitative enough.

[Enderman]

Just now, Berget said:

It has some use cases

Uh no.

Optane sucks because not only is it a very small amount of space, but it also has to decide on what it speeds up, so only a few things are going to be fast.

Not only do you not get to choose what it speeds up, since it does it for you, but it also constantly changes based on what files/programs you use most.

That means it is writing back and forth to your HDD which increases drive usage and also wastes writes on the SSD.

You also have to use a file or program multiple times before the algorithm detects it and moves the data to cache, so the first time you open something it will never be fast.

 

RAPID sucks because it is ram cache so when power goes out everything is lost.

To prevent critical data loss the software is almost always saving the data in ram back to the real drive, again increasing drive usage and wasting writes.

Not only does it waste your ram, but the speed you gain is not noticeable in any consumer tasks.

As I said earlier, if your job is video editing or something like that then you can buy an NVME drive which will not waste your ram and doesn't have all the problems of a ram disk.

Also, the amount of space in the ram drive is extremely small compared to that of a full SSD, almost useless. Unless you have 128GB of ram or something like that, but then you probably have other uses for the ram that are more important.

 

For example, if you are a video editor, you can adjust how much ram it is allowed to use in the settings so that the files you are using get moved there for faster preview.

If you have a ramdisk, not only will it be sucking up part of your ram, but it will make 0 difference because the files will be there already because that's how video editing software works.

 

RAPID was specifically made to inflate artificial benchmark numbers to make people think that the SSD is extremely fast. If you have a samsung SSD the best idea is to not install the magician software at all.

[Enderman]

8 minutes ago, Ja50n said:

The point wasn’t practicality, it was wanting to know how their performance compares. I want numbers, just calling something dumb isn’t nearly quantitative enough.

You can read above to understand why both of those things are dumb and useless.

For numbers you can simply google "ram disk speed" and "optane speed"

It's not hard.

Obviously ram is a lot faster.

[Apsis0215]

Looking at faster ways to cache and access data- there was this presentation by Dave's Garage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0Kao4TBfhQ Supercharging Windows Disk Speeds which was very interesting; around caching the data and the File tables in Ram for faster search/read/write/access.

I wonder if PCI Drives will ever nudge up close enough to replace ram?