Optane on already excisting system?

[AT0MAC]

I have a build around the Maximus X Code Z370 board, my "Killer Panda Z370".
For game drive I primarily use a WD black, but compared to the rest of the machine it feels painfully slow to start a game.

Was wondering, if I should swap it for a SSD or if I for 1/2 or even 1/3 of the cost of an SSD should put in either a 64 or a 32 gb optane drive?

If so, I really dont know if its going to screw with the rest of the setup, im booting off nvme, i have sata drives on both port 2, 4 and 5 but the drive I want to boost is only the game drive without touching any of the others.

Clarify for me please before i do something stupid

[spartaman64]

i cant tell the difference between nvme and sata ssds so i personally would go for a higher capacity sata ssd

[AT0MAC]

Just now, spartaman64 said:

i cant tell the difference between nvme and sata ssds so i personally would go for a higher capacity sata ssd

im not touching my nvme drive, its just for boot and programs, im only talking about either boosting my old spinning wd black or replacing it with a newer sata based ssd instead - difference in price is somewhere between double or triple the price, if i invest in the ssd instead of a 32-64gb optane

[spartaman64]

1 minute ago, AT0MAC said:

im not touching my nvme drive, its just for boot and programs, im only talking about either boosting my old spinning wd black or replacing it with a newer sata based ssd instead - difference in price is somewhere between double or triple the price, if i invest in the ssd instead of a 32-64gb optane

if you are going to be running a few programs less than 64GB all the time and you dont worry about the speed for other programs maybe the optane drive is better but if you are going to be running all kinds of programs coming out to more than 64GB a lot of the time then you are probably better with a sata ssd

[AT0MAC]

3 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

if you are going to be running a few programs less than 64GB all the time and you dont worry about the speed for other programs maybe the optane drive is better but if you are going to be running all kinds of programs coming out to more than 64GB a lot of the time then you are probably better with a sata ssd

its a game drive, i dont image a game is loading all its files for every gameplay you do, so the 64gb optane should be a good solution right?

and installing it will not screw around with the way the other drives are already setup?

[spartaman64]

4 minutes ago, AT0MAC said:

its a game drive, i dont image a game is loading all its files for every gameplay you do, so the 64gb optane should be a good solution right?

and installing it will not screw around with the say the other drives are already setup?

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-rst-driver-16.0.2-optane,36803.html

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/55005/Intel-Rapid-Storage-Technology-Intel-RST-

it probably will be fine

[AT0MAC]

the place where i get a little confused is if the bios should be set to raid or not - it makes sense to do it if it was the boot drive, but im not sure its needed if its the data drive - and if so, if it screws up the other data drives that are not part of that raid

[spartaman64]

6 minutes ago, AT0MAC said:

the place where i get a little confused is if the bios should be set to raid or not - it makes sense to do it if it was the boot drive, but im not sure its needed if its the data drive - and if so, if it screws up the other data drives that are not part of that raid

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005815/technologies.html
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005867/technologies.html

i dont know if these help i never dealt with intel rst so its out of my depth

[porina]

In my limited experience with Optane as cache, I generally set up my systems as AHCI. The Optane installer does the configurations for you, and in my case I think it set it to raid or whatever when I used it to add Optane to a storage drive. As for performance, I couldn't feel it for reads but it did reduce performance of writes.

 

As such, I'd suggest getting a large SATA SSD (don't worry about performance, got for price per capacity) and install the games you care most about performance on that.

[TechyBen]

37 minutes ago, AT0MAC said:

im not touching my nvme drive, its just for boot and programs, im only talking about either boosting my old spinning wd black or replacing it with a newer sata based ssd instead - difference in price is somewhere between double or triple the price, if i invest in the ssd instead of a 32-64gb optane

AFAIK your performance gain will be minimum as you already have an SSD.

 

If you want to game, go for a bigger SSD to add games to. If you want to benchmark/have specific server/encoding needs, an Optain *may* be faster.

 

PS, I just put small games (indie 2d etc) on spinning rust, and anything else on SSD. Else put rarely used games on rust, and common games on silicone. I Know Optain does this automagically... but really, why the price/storage limit when AMD (or $30 for software) will do it for free/$30 forever.

 

Optain is a server solution, it is a general computing solution that needs motherboard/DRAM/HDD controller integration. It's current system/setup is just pointless (like early SSDs that were smaller, slower and more expensive, more failure prone etc on release, but LATER became amazing tech).

[AT0MAC]

25 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

AFAIK your performance gain will be minimum as you already have an SSD.

 

If you want to game, go for a bigger SSD to add games to. If you want to benchmark/have specific server/encoding needs, an Optain *may* be faster.

 

PS, I just put small games (indie 2d etc) on spinning rust, and anything else on SSD. Else put rarely used games on rust, and common games on silicone. I Know Optain does this automagically... but really, why the price/storage limit when AMD (or $30 for software) will do it for free/$30 forever.

 

Optain is a server solution, it is a general computing solution that needs motherboard/DRAM/HDD controller integration. It's current system/setup is just pointless (like early SSDs that were smaller, slower and more expensive, more failure prone etc on release, but LATER became amazing tech).

thanks, i see your point. i should just get an extra ssd at some point.

[seagate_surfer]

Hello AT0MAC,

 

Optane is more applicable to cases where you want to accelerate a SATA drive to NVME transfer rates, any SATA based drive is compatible like an HDD, SSD, SSHD. But this is more for people not willing to invest a lot to get NVMe transfer rates since it only accelerates your existing unit and it doesn't more storage capacity, you can accelerate primary and secondary units but that's about it. I can't complain about booting a system from this configuration but if storage is your priority instead of transfer rates then any SATA SSD drive can get the job done.

[TechyBen]

Optain does have very good latency and some other specific things. But most consumers don't need this. Like EVER.

But servers, and the likes of "6 editors 1 PC" make it totally worth it. But for us mer mortals ( ), we don't notice the 0.03 second decrease in a single disk cache hit, but a 4k render over 6 requests on a single server raid array would benefit massively (I guess?) from optain.

 

In Fact, I wonder if @Linus @LinusSebastian (which is him?  ) would do a before and after benchmark? Then a AMD/Cache software benchmark?

[seagate_surfer]

They did if I am not mistaken, they accelerated with AMD/Cache software one drive using the Optane module. What cannot be done is to accelerate a RAID array, Optane will return an error if you try because it can only accelerate one unit at a time.

[seagate_surfer]

Actually I just found the video! Sorry I didn't post it earlier but here we go, Optane accelerated with AMD/Cache software: 

 

[TechyBen]

17 minutes ago, seagate_surfer said:

They did if I am not mistaken, they accelerated with AMD/Cache software one drive using the Optane module. What cannot be done is to accelerate a RAID array, Optane will return an error if you try because it can only accelerate one unit at a time.

[edit as I type]... ah, you know what, I missed the one useful bar chart.

 

It is "quicker" (for both AMD and Intel caching options) than a lone SSD, which I assume is due to also having RAM caching (or ram like speeds with optain). Still would love to check over the pros/cons myself. As so hard to know what is from hardware improvements (Optain as a plain SSD is fast as is) and what is from proprietary software (we could all use Linux free caching options ) etc.

 

Basically locked down code (and by extension locked down hardware tech) makes things really awkward to judge. See the latest example from Intel trying to ban benchmarks, or Nvidia saying "2080 is 1000 times faster" when really it's just totally new/different tech, so of cause the last gen had zero support for it.

[seagate_surfer]

Yeah! Of course they will keep their methods in secret, they want to avoid the Optane to make systems with 4th, 5th, 6th generation of iCore faster than the newer ones, just imagine what it would be to have an old system from 2012 going faster than what you can get in 2018. Upgrading would become non-sense. Linux is our friend but unfortunately manufacturers don't tend to support systems with Linux, they usually refer you to the community to find your own answers... 

[Stefan Payne]

On 24.8.2018 at 11:40 AM, AT0MAC said:

Was wondering, if I should swap it for a SSD or if I for 1/2 or even 1/3 of the cost of an SSD should put in either a 64 or a 32 gb optane drive?

Optane are mostly bullshit as they are way too expensive.

You can get almost 10 times the capacity with a normal SSD!

For a 32GB Optane you can get a 250GB SSD, for the 64GB one, you can get 500GB SSDs, even the good NVMe are inside the price range...

 

Makes no sense to go for Optane and not get an SSD...

[seagate_surfer]

I just posted something about Optane and for whom it is worth it, quote the following from that post:

 

2 hours ago, seagate_surfer said:

Yes! The Optane module acts like that RAM chip on the controller board I was talking about, it moves essential files and the frequently accessed files, applications and data so that everything gets handled over the NVMe interface of Optane and not over the built-in-cache of the HDD.

If you want high speed access then yes, just get an SSD instead and don't worry about the what cache on an HDD and this or that... In perspective, even 64mb is rather minuscule relative to the total size of the drive. A secondary drive to me, what becomes relevant is the size because what is more important will be in the M.2, and once again, any SSD will be faster than nay hard drive.

Several questions for being the last one! This is the exact use of Optane, there are many people out there and for many of those Optane is not worth it, there are also millions of people that only want one upgrade of their existing equipment without investing that much and here is where Optane comes. It has the purpose of accelerating a cheap drive to outstanding performance of NVME and these people is what really will get a benefit out of the Optane than other people more willing to spend on one upgrade, but for many of us out there, there is no need to invest that much, just get an optane and accelerate the best SATA HDD offer you can find, it helps way too much like to be ignored. You can use one HDD concatenated with Optane to boot your system and make it your primary device and then get a second HDD just for the storage, so will end up with 2 bigger units for storing/back up and this will result on a faster system than booting up from FireCuda, because NVMe is way faster than SATA, so if you boot from NVMe which is what the Optane does on boot devices (it moves boot files to the Optane module) the load times will be significantly lower than when you boot from any SATA drive.

 

Regarding the prices... I don't think the type of chip that was used to create the Optane will drop soon, this chip uses different algorithms and under the microscope the way it stores data also changes, so this is not gonna happen on 2018 or 2019 (or at least I don't think it will), what is going to drop is the price of the NAND chips because there is over production, so during the following months and throughout 2019 the SSDs that are based on these chips are expected to drop its prices, SSDs based on NAND chips are expected to equal the prices of HDDs so at some point there won't be any reason why not to get one.

 

[TechyBen]

PS, that post might be partially wrong. HD on board RAM cache =/= Optain caching (or software or hardware caching options from OS level down). Even some SSDs could have some RAM on them... it's costs and performance/reliability things there.

[seagate_surfer]

Please highlight where you see the discrepancy, I may not have transferred to idea correctly. And thanks!  

[TechyBen]

"everything gets handled over the NVMe interface of Optane and not over the built-in-cache of the HDD"

There are RAM caches to HDDs/SSDs (Less so in SSDs). And hybrid HDDs with SSD caches... so multiple types of cache. Optain and StoreMI are a different type of cache to some other hardware or software options (for example, Windows already has a pagefile option that can be set to a custom/seperate SSD or RAM). So lots of different layers to it.

[seagate_surfer]

Oh, I see what you are saying! There are different plenty of options/layers when it comes to cache. Under this context what I tried to say with "everything gets handled over the NVMe interface of Optane and not over the built-in-cache of the HDD" is that, after accelerating a HDD with Optane the boot files are moved to the Optane module, so it is the Optane that boots and not the accelerated drive. It is like having one NVMe working as a boot drive and a larger secondary HDD for storage but with the difference that only the boot files are moved, the rest of the OS will remain in the accelerated drive. Once the hard drive is accelerated with this method, the applications will open faster because the start files got moved to Optane, same with other type of files that are accessed with more frequency. So, what really works under this type of configuration or system acceleration or cache however you prefer to call is the Optane module. The cache memory of the HDD or SSD will also continue to work of course and it will do what it is supposed to, which is preparing what needs to be accessed to have it ready for when is needed and save some time in the actual amount of time that it takes to those files to be moved from the HDD through the motherboard, of course files in the cache will be accessed faster than files not located there and that's exactly what the Optane does, so the cache in one accelerated drive will work less under configurations with Optane + Accelerated Drive, system acceleration moves what is accessed more frequently to take care of it so the user doesn't have to wait for the HDD, the user will wait for the Optane instead and the Optane module at the same time uses a small cache portion of memory media management and maintenance just like any other storage drive but with the difference that the interface is NVMe so the wait times will be way way lower in comparison to SATA drives. See more in the FAQs: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000024018/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html

 

[TechyBen]

I wonder if it can be done the opposite. Put the OS on the optain, and automatically backup to HDD (write to both drives, read from Optain). Does not increase storage, but would allow for automatic backups... Lol, it would be storage from the bottom up, instead of the top down.

 

[AT0MAC]

6 minutes ago, TechyBen said:

I wonder if it can be done the opposite. Put the OS on the optain, and automatically backup to HDD (write to both drives, read from Optain). Does not increase storage, but would allow for automatic backups... Lol, it would be storage from the bottom up, instead of the top down.

 

thats quite clever if it could do just that from a hardware level, with no performance hit to the actual system - how to tell Intel about this? this is for sure something people want!