Intel Optane Speed

[BlazeKitten]

Is intel optane able to speed up transfer rates from a secondary hdd to another? I have 2 slow hard drives and want faster transfer speeds on my hdd's that aren't on my OS drive

[Lurick]

I don't think it would since Optane caches frequently accessed files for quicker access. Unless you're sending the same files back and forth a bunch it wouldn't really cache them and if it did, once you fill up the space on the optane drive you'll run out of buffer since it can only move files from itself to the other HDD at the speed of that HDD so if you're transferring a large file that's larger than the optane drive I'm not sure how it could cache it all at once.

[colonel_mortis]

(Moved to Storage Devices)

[Sniperfox47]

9 hours ago, BlazeKitten said:

Is intel optane able to speed up transfer rates from a secondary hdd to another? I have 2 slow hard drives and want faster transfer speeds on my hdd's that aren't on my OS drive

No. Optane doesn't really help with moving data back and forth at all.

 

If you need to write data to the drive (more than a little data here and there) it will likely make that a tiny bit slower, due to how caches work.

 

What Optane helps with is a "Write Once, Read Many" situation when you have files on the drive that don't change much but which you have to open frequently. This is typically things like OS system files, game files, programs you open frequently like Photoshop or Office, large files that you open frequently and things like that.

 

Optane doesn't make your slow crappy hard drive faster speed wise. It makes it more responsive, which means that it *feels* faster. Apps load quicker, games load faster, your OS boots quicker, but it doesn't actually speed up the hard drive itself.

[porina]

8 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

If you need to write data to the drive (more than a little data here and there) it will likely make that a tiny bit slower, due to how caches work.

In my one-off testing, it makes sustained writes a LOT worse than using a drive directly. The first few tens of GB go pretty fast, but I think that is some caching maybe in part due to OS, but after that, it dropped down to like 30GB/s whereas the bare drive I was using was around 80GB/s.

[Sniperfox47]

17 minutes ago, porina said:

In my one-off testing, it makes sustained writes a LOT worse than using a drive directly. The first few tens of GB go pretty fast, but I think that is some caching maybe in part due to OS, but after that, it dropped down to like 30GB/s whereas the bare drive I was using was around 80GB/s.

Were you using the official Optane RST drivers? If so good to know.

 

I didn't have those issues with bcache on Linux or Intel SRT with maximized performance mode off via the standard RST drivers on Windows (from before they added in secondary drive caching to the Optane drivers themselves).

[porina]

48 minutes ago, Sniperfox47 said:

Were you using the official Optane RST drivers? If so good to know.

Can't remember the exact name or version, but it was the Optane setup tool on Win10 to enable secondary (data) drive caching.

[nosirrahx]

3 hours ago, porina said:

Can't remember the exact name or version, but it was the Optane setup tool on Win10 to enable secondary (data) drive caching.

There is a restriction on this though, you need a current gen chipset and CPU.

[Sniperfox47]

1 hour ago, nosirrahx said:

There is a restriction on this though, you need a current gen chipset and CPU.

No you really don't. You just need modern firmware, manually updated RST drivers and a CPU that supports Optane.

 

The communication about requiring 8th gen CPUs is because they only officially support that, since that's the first series chipset that defaults to the proper bios level and RST driver.

[nosirrahx]

5 hours ago, Sniperfox47 said:

No you really don't. You just need modern firmware, manually updated RST drivers and a CPU that supports Optane.

 

The communication about requiring 8th gen CPUs is because they only officially support that, since that's the first series chipset that defaults to the proper bios level and RST driver.

The sad thing is that I should have suspected that since a lot of what they don't support works just fine.