Is Optane Garbage?

[PeteyBoPetey]

Hi Guys,

 

I've watched Linus's reviews on Intel's Optane and thought it would be a great addition to my RAID 5 array as a cache drive. Boy was I wrong!. 

 

I have the 32GB model, and shows up in Rapid Storage Technology as 27GB?. I went through all the menus and used it to "accelerate" my RAID5 array. It writes the first 20 gigs as PCIe NVMe speeds then slows down to 5MB/s. When I disable Optane I get write speeds off 50MB/s. Ten times faster!. So Optane can speed up writing small files, but it slows down large writes? WTF?

 

I already have a EVO 970. Intel RST won't let me partition 128GB and use it as cache, and it will only let me use 64GB of a EVO 850?.

 

Surely there must be a way to use a 128GB M.2 drive as cache in RST? I can buy a 128GB M.2 that will give me 500MB/s writes for $49. But because RST won't let me, I have to pay $299 for an 118GB Optane module?. Sounds like extortion to me?. Is Intel following Apple's business plan?

 

Peter

[AskTJ]

The drive isn't fully 32GB as when the drive is formatted, it takes up space, making the drive ready for Windows to boot in to.

[Sakkura]

Intel SRT was developed back in the Sandy Bridge era, when 128GB SSDs were still fairly expensive and not suitable as a cheap cache. That's why it has that 64GB limitation.

[PeteyBoPetey]

Just an update: Gave up on Optane. Complete waste of time and money IMHO. Ended up using Romex PrimoCache. Partitioned 128GB of my Samsung PCIe and getting consistent 900MB/s writes. Strange thing is, my actual write speed to the array has gone up from 10 to 20 MB/s to a consistent 50MB/s. Wonder why?

[mzlink]

Primo Cache is probably a better solution, as it works with any SSD

 

https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/

[PeteyBoPetey]

Further Update: Tweaked the settings. Allocated more RAM and now I get 2GB/s write. 240MB/s reads. 80 to 120MB/s actual writes. Primo Cache seems to allocate more memory and CPU to calculate the parity bits on the RAID 5. Shits on RST

[seagate_surfer]

Hello PeteyBoPetey, 

 

The Optane module cannot accelerate a RAID volume, and it cannot accelerate more than one drive at a time, pretty much one HDD per Optane module and only one Optane Module per system.

 

[PeteyBoPetey]

@seagate_surfer It seems Optane is in the market 10 years to late?. It's really only any good to accelerate one mechanical hard disk, and that's about it. Now that SSD's (even 256 Gb) are more affordable, it's seems like Optane is a waste of money, when the money can be invested into a PCIe SSD and use a portion of it as cache?.

 

The strange thing is, Optane seemed to hobble the arrays actual right speeds. I thought RST took forever to calculate the parity bit. Since removing the Optane module the arrays write speed has gone from 10MB/s (which I just accepted because it is a RAID 5 after all) to 80 to 120MB/s?.

[seagate_surfer]

It sounds about right but not quite! The Optane module 10 years could have been considered superfluous... The demand for speeds were increasing but it was definitely not what we demand today. That's why revisions under the same fundamentals were made at that time and we came across with SSDs because NAND chips can handle better/faster speeds than rotating plates but still limited to the SATA standards so the SATA 3 and eSATA appeared because it was what was needed. Eventhough SATA was used in %99 of systems 10 years ago today we consider it old and just want to take advantage of the new ports in the motherboards so Intel came up with the Optane module, not based on revision of SATA but it can accelerate any drive based on the fundamentals of that transfer bus regardless if it is a traditional hard disk with rotating plates or a SSHD or a SSD. So it brings SATA drives to todays transfer rates and it is mostly used by people with one large HDD and PCIe NVMe ports available in their motherboard fixing the bottlenecks of our previous standards SATA/PATA created by their revisions. (Because they adapted technology made for IDE to SATA drives, instead of creating a new standard with SATA in mind)

 

I still believe a RAID array can be accelerated with Opatne but it is not its use, yet! I don't doubt that with the time and Optane becoming the new fashion (because I believe Optane chips will be the new SSDs) someone will make bigger modules, once they hit the masses, to accelerate a RAID array.

[PeteyBoPetey]

14 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

I still believe a RAID array can be accelerated with Opatne but it is not its use, yet! I don't doubt that with the time and Optane becoming the new fashion (because I believe Optane chips will be the new SSDs) someone will make bigger modules, once they hit the masses, to accelerate a RAID array.

The point I'm making is; If you already have a PCIe NVMe why would Intel force a user to buy an additional Optane module to accelerate an HDD or RAID, when RST can use a partition on the PCIe NVMe which would do exactly the same result?. Plus the Optane module is using up a M.2 slot that could take another 1TB drive for expansion in future.

[seagate_surfer]

You got a point there! With the existing prices and where we are right now SSDs offer several reasons to become an actual replacement for any HDD but I wouldn't say they force you to use Optane. The acceleration with RST is actually not a new idea, based on their specs for RST as long as your motherboard has Intel-powered SATA ports and chipsets, you could do system acceleration by enabling RAID mode from the BIOS:

Intel® Smart Response Technology User Guide: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005501/boards-and-kits.html

 

Since the creation of the Intel® Z68 Chipset this was an option, their specifications are still available to public in the intel ARK website and it seems to be that the chipset was launched in 2011: Intel® Z68 Express Chipset https://ark.intel.com/products/52816/Intel-Z68-Express-Chipset

 

The minimum a SSD needs to be is 18.6 GB to accelerate a system and max is 64GB, so you could accelerate a SATA HDD to speeds of SSDs performance either PCIe SSD or SATA SSD with a small 20-64GB SSD and RST, or save a portion of bigger SSDs for cache of the HDD where your system resides (very good because even 10K RPM HDD are significantly slower in comparison to SSDs).

 

What makes Optane new is not the system acceleration from 2011 for obvious reasons, or that you could accelerate systems with PCIe hard drives but the fact that SATA SSDs, SSHDs and HDDs can be accelerated (they say concatenated to sound more cool) to 3D Xpoint instead of NAND.

 

I would say that's more appealing to people not willing to spends more than 30-50 bucks to experience the NVME speeds. Just like the RST acceleration between SATA drives, caching the most frequently accessed bits of data to a faster solid-state cache to yield NVMe-like performance in a system that uses a standard hard drives takes time, after 3 reboots you should be good but that also means the SSD cache offers little or 0 performance benefit to new or infrequently accessed data.

 

So, this is not for systems with NVME hard drives as their primary drive, of course a RAID NVME will behave way better than the SATA-NVME RAID configuration that Intel offers with Optane. I would say this is for the masses/technology enthusiasts willing to check what the 3D Xpoint can offer and they say it offers a lot, they say it fixes many bottlenecks of the NAND chips.

 

Again this is not for everybody, if you can afford a NVME hard drive as your main driver go for it you will find no regrets on booting from an NVME device (this is so sweet and beautiful) but the main focus here is affordability and there is a huge population without the need of accelerating files but with the curiosity to know how it feels and this applies more to them.

[Amazonsucks]

On 7/17/2018 at 1:45 AM, PeteyBoPetey said:

@seagate_surfer It seems Optane is in the market 10 years to late?. It's really only any good to accelerate one mechanical hard disk, and that's about it. Now that SSD's (even 256 Gb) are more affordable, it's seems like Optane is a waste of money, when the money can be invested into a PCIe SSD and use a portion of it as cache?.

 

The strange thing is, Optane seemed to hobble the arrays actual right speeds. I thought RST took forever to calculate the parity bit. Since removing the Optane module the arrays write speed has gone from 10MB/s (which I just accepted because it is a RAID 5 after all) to 80 to 120MB/s?.

Wut? Optane is for nonvolatile storage class memory usage or fast SSDs. Theyre using it in cheap system booster things because it actually works well for a single spinning rust.

 

If you need such throughput why arent you using an all flash array anyway?

[PeteyBoPetey]

11 minutes ago, Amazonsucks said:

Wut? Optane is for nonvolatile storage class memory usage or fast SSDs. Theyre using it in cheap system booster things because it actually works well for a single spinning rust.

 

If you need such throughput why arent you using an all flash array anyway?

Because I'm using it to accelerate a RAID 5 array. My point is, why am I paying $70 for an Optane module when I already have a Samsung 970 evo PCIe NVMe?.

[Amazonsucks]

36 minutes ago, PeteyBoPetey said:

Because I'm using it to accelerate a RAID 5 array. My point is, why am I paying $70 for an Optane module when I already have a Samsung 970 evo PCIe NVMe?.

Idk why. Its not intended to accelerate a RAID. 

[PeteyBoPetey]

1 minute ago, Amazonsucks said:

Idk why. Its not intended to accelerate a RAID. 

Why not?. It's intended use is to cache a mechanical hard drive isn't it?. Act as a buffer. Why won't Intel's RST let me use my NVMe' as a cache drive?

[Amazonsucks]

14 minutes ago, PeteyBoPetey said:

Why not?. It's intended use is to cache a mechanical hard drive isn't it?. Act as a buffer. Why won't Intel's RST let me use my NVMe' as a cache drive?

Idk the specifics, but its caching functionality probably cant work without Intel modifying RST software to actually work properly with it. Seems like they havent done that, which is them offering terrible software support as usual.

 

Its probably more complex to have whats essentially a burst buffer with a RAID than a burst buffer with a single drive.

[seagate_surfer]

Regarding the NVME drives. PCIe* NVMe* drives are not supported for system acceleration (They don't need to be accelerated to NVME speeds), as per Intel FAQs the system acceleration can only be enabled with a SATA HDD, SSD, or SSHD:

• https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/support/articles/000025569/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html
• 

Once the drive is partitioned the metadata of the GUID Partition Table is what will be moved to the Optane, it needs to be GPT to catch with UEFI which eventually will replace BIOS. This data also corresponds to a unique identificator ID of the hard drive like the Vendor ID (VID) and Product ID (PID) and Master Boot Records located on the first sector of a disk in Cylinder: 0, Head: 0, Sector: 1. to be specific (Out of the partition sectors but created while the drive was being partitioned). If Optane identifies that there is more than one MBR it will fail to concatenate, examples would be when you upgrade your Windows and a recovery partition is created to roll back in case of disaster (Automatic creation of Windows.old folder in C: ) or when Windows is installed including the recovery console, in these instances there could be a locked partition at the end of the SATA drive and that's why one requirement is that there must be space at the end to avoid logical partitions to transfer also their boot record and avoid conflicts:

 

• 

Another case would be when the hard drive contains two operating systems or more, it is not supported because of the same reasons than before. When two volumes are identified in the same drive it conflicts with the MBR metada to be transferred and this cannot happen, as results on these configurations are not guaranteed it is not supported and pretty much this is the main reason why it won't let you add more than one drive. If there was a way to "hack" these metada and make all drives or all partitions share the same metada then there could be chances to accelerate more than one SATA drive at a time but that's at your own risk, and again Optane acceleration is not for NVME drives. 

 

• 

[PeteyBoPetey]

18 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

Regarding the NVME drives. PCIe* NVMe* drives are not supported for system acceleration (They don't need to be accelerated to NVME speeds), as per Intel FAQs the system acceleration can only be enabled with a SATA HDD, SSD, or SSHD:

• https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/support/articles/000025569/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html
• 

Once the drive is partitioned the metadata of the GUID Partition Table is what will be moved to the Optane, it needs to be GPT to catch with UEFI which eventually will replace BIOS. This data also corresponds to a unique identificator ID of the hard drive like the Vendor ID (VID) and Product ID (PID) and Master Boot Records located on the first sector of a disk in Cylinder: 0, Head: 0, Sector: 1. to be specific (Out of the partition sectors but created while the drive was being partitioned). If Optane identifies that there is more than one MBR it will fail to concatenate, examples would be when you upgrade your Windows and a recovery partition is created to roll back in case of disaster (Automatic creation of Windows.old folder in C: ) or when Windows is installed including the recovery console, in these instances there could be a locked partition at the end of the SATA drive and that's why one requirement is that there must be space at the end to avoid logical partitions to transfer also their boot record and avoid conflicts:

 

• 

Another case would be when the hard drive contains two operating systems or more, it is not supported because of the same reasons than before. When two volumes are identified in the same drive it conflicts with the MBR metada to be transferred and this cannot happen, as results on these configurations are not guaranteed it is not supported and pretty much this is the main reason why it won't let you add more than one drive. If there was a way to "hack" these metada and make all drives or all partitions share the same metada then there could be chances to accelerate more than one SATA drive at a time but that's at your own risk, and again Optane acceleration is not for NVME drives. 

 

• 

I don't want to accelerate my NVMe with an NVMe. I want to accelerate a RAID5 array with my NVMe. I can accelerate using a SATA3 SSD, but not my NVMe. Oh nooooo......I have to fork out more money for a Optane drive which is esentially the same as my NVMe

[Toysrme]

I had a pair of them & was so underwhelmed I gave one to a friend. I do not recommend them. The smaller m.2 Optane cache drives are semi-useful (If you can spare the pcie lanes), but not game changing. I don't advise people using them with the Intel driver; there is no flexibility to the Intel driver.

My example against them as a caching solution. Why cache with a 13/27/58/112gb Optane drive which via the Intel driver can only cache one drive (and are easily bricked. One of mine failed...), when for $25usd you could use a 128gb SATA SSD. Price for price, you can have 10 times the cache hit rate and have the ability to cache multiple drives. The access time advantage is fairly moot.

Anything that would truly benefit from Optane's access time advantage you'll be better off running a small portion of ram as a ram cache at this point.

On my top two rigs:
NAS: 5x 3tb HGST drives with 2x 128gb ssd's in raid-5

 

On my gaming rig:
8gb ram caching my OS drive, small game drive
the OS drive is a 128gb sata ssd
another 128gb sata SSD for a pair of games
1x 3tb HGST drive, cached by a 128gb sata SSD

My main dual xeon server/workstation
12gb ram caching a 128gb OS drive

2x Mushkin Scorpion Deluxe pcie ssd's in raid-0 for work/scratch
 

For windows, Primocache (Fancycache) is very nice & flexible. Unlike the intel driver you can use whatever you want to cache whatever you want. Ram, drives of all types, whatever. Read only, write only, read & write... Issue deferred writes to really stack the sequential write speed of HDD's in your advantage. If doing a ram cache, load contents at boot (windows does this by itself, just not aggressively)

Primocache is well worth the money for a single license.

[goto10]

On 7/15/2018 at 3:36 AM, PeteyBoPetey said:

Hi Guys,

 

I've watched Linus's reviews on Intel's Optane and thought it would be a great addition to my RAID 5 array as a cache drive. Boy was I wrong!. 

 

I have the 32GB model, and shows up in Rapid Storage Technology as 27GB?. I went through all the menus and used it to "accelerate" my RAID5 array. It writes the first 20 gigs as PCIe NVMe speeds then slows down to 5MB/s. When I disable Optane I get write speeds off 50MB/s. Ten times faster!. So Optane can speed up writing small files, but it slows down large writes? WTF?

 

I already have a EVO 970. Intel RST won't let me partition 128GB and use it as cache, and it will only let me use 64GB of a EVO 850?.

 

Surely there must be a way to use a 128GB M.2 drive as cache in RST? I can buy a 128GB M.2 that will give me 500MB/s writes for $49. But because RST won't let me, I have to pay $299 for an 118GB Optane module?. Sounds like extortion to me?. Is Intel following Apple's business plan?

 

Peter

is 32 gigabytes, measured as in each gb is 1000 mbs and each mb is 1000 kb and each kb is 1000 bytes, windows measures each gb, mb and kb as 1024, it should give you around 28gbs, same as in a 120 gb ssd, once formated it has 111.8gbs thanks to manufacture measuring things as 1000 but windows talking about 1024

 

about optane, it is a thing that has no real use, a ssd does more and as mentioned doesn't really help with raid on all situations, is half of unproper implementation and no use for it, tht is optane

[Amazonsucks]

@Toysrme you said "windows does this at boot, just not aggressively". What do you mean by that? Do you mean that it loads frequently accessed data to RAM, but not much on boot?

 

And separately, you can make a larger RAM cache using primocache?