I’m getting 32gb of intel optane. Should I pair that with barracuda 2tb (64mb cache), barracuda 4tb (256mb Cache), or a 2tb firecuda

[RyRyJS]

Thanks in advance

[unijab]

StoreMI ?

[mariushm]

You shouldn't pair it with anything, the advantages are minimal and only if you run applications from those drives (the files of those applications would be cached in the optane drive over time and therefore accelerated).

 

Get a 128-256 GB SSD and install and run applications only from that SSD and use the mechanical drive for "static" files (music, video files etc) only... that makes more sense.

[r2724r16]

Don't buy an Intel Optane SSD, just buy a normal sata SSD 

[Bananasplit_00]

if it HAS to be optane instead of a 120gb SSD id just pair it with the best drive you can,  so i guess the 4TB?

[RyRyJS]

why not optane, im going to have a lot of files and i want them to be fast and have the convenience of optane picking the files for me. Its not just a overpriced ssd you know. Its an accelerator.

[aezakmi]

48 minutes ago, RyRyJS said:

why not optane, im going to have a lot of files and i want them to be fast and have the convenience of optane picking the files for me. Its not just a overpriced ssd you know. Its an accelerator.

Depends what SSDs are you looking at, Samsung is overpriced af but there are other brands like

Crucial, Intel, Sandisk or even Kingston (regular kingston not "gamer" kingston)

 

Just get a 120GB one and install the OS and whatever software you need to have fast loading times

1 hour ago, mariushm said:

-snip- and use the mechanical drive for "static" files (music, video files etc) only... that makes more sense.

 

[mariushm]

54 minutes ago, RyRyJS said:

why not optane, im going to have a lot of files and i want them to be fast and have the convenience of optane picking the files for me. Its not just a overpriced ssd you know. Its an accelerator.

It's an accelerator pretty much only by name. The "accelerator" part is in the firmware (the chipset "bios" and the bios on the motherboard and the drivers), the drive itself is more or less like a SSD.

 

Optane memory is just a different kind of Flash memory with higher endurance and lower latency. Intel could make and they did make SSDs that used Optane chips instead of Flash chips for storing data, they don't do it anymore or don't advertise it so much because it's not cost effective to make SSDs with them, because it costs much more to manufacture Optane chips compared to Flash chips. Intel basically rebranded the chips from "storage" to "accelerator" to build a market for them and because paying so much for a SSD was seen by customers as stupid.

 

So basically Intel wrote the firmware and software (the drivers) to treat Optane drives as "special" accelerator drives and the driver simply monitors what files you read from the mechanical drive and if they're accessed often, they copy them to the Optane drive.

Intel could use a regular SSD drive as "accelerator" but they made it work only with Optane to create an artificial difference between Intel and AMD systems ... that's why it only works with some Intel chipsets.

 

I think the firmware and drivers aren't smart enough to differentiate between files and all that... for example, let's say you play a game which has a 10 GB file from which every time you load a level or a map, the game extracts a few random hundreds of MB (textures, music tracks, sound effects for that level).

I think the accelerator would be stupid enough to think you'd want that 10 GB file cached in the Optane because the game opens that file so often, so if it does that with 3-4 files like that, the whole Optane will be filled with only a bunch of big files and all your applications would be dropped out and you'd have nothing accelerated but that game..

 

[unijab]

optane memory and optane ssds can all be used as storage.. the smaller sizes were just poorly marketed... IMO

[RyRyJS]

40 minutes ago, mariushm said:

It's an accelerator pretty much only by name. The "accelerator" part is in the firmware (the chipset "bios" and the bios on the motherboard and the drivers), the drive itself is more or less like a SSD.

 

Optane memory is just a different kind of Flash memory with higher endurance and lower latency. Intel could make and they did make SSDs that used Optane chips instead of Flash chips for storing data, they don't do it anymore or don't advertise it so much because it's not cost effective to make SSDs with them, because it costs much more to manufacture Optane chips compared to Flash chips. Intel basically rebranded the chips from "storage" to "accelerator" to build a market for them and because paying so much for a SSD was seen by customers as stupid.

 

So basically Intel wrote the firmware and software (the drivers) to treat Optane drives as "special" accelerator drives and the driver simply monitors what files you read from the mechanical drive and if they're accessed often, they copy them to the Optane drive.

Intel could use a regular SSD drive as "accelerator" but they made it work only with Optane to create an artificial difference between Intel and AMD systems ... that's why it only works with some Intel chipsets.

 

I think the firmware and drivers aren't smart enough to differentiate between files and all that... for example, let's say you play a game which has a 10 GB file from which every time you load a level or a map, the game extracts a few random hundreds of MB (textures, music tracks, sound effects for that level).

I think the accelerator would be stupid enough to think you'd want that 10 GB file cached in the Optane because the game opens that file so often, so if it does that with 3-4 files like that, the whole Optane will be filled with only a bunch of big files and all your applications would be dropped out and you'd have nothing accelerated but that game..

 

I think you just dislike optane.. If you don't play the game that often, it will erase from optane.. Also It only works with new intel cpu`s because they are designed to work with it.. If you look at the benchmarks optane is pretty good. Its like a really good sshd.