Optane low random performance

porina · November 17, 2018

Device is Optane 900p 280G connected over M.2 x4 to system chipset, and is the boot drive in game system in my sig.

I've been getting lag spikes in games for about a week now and it's getting really annoying. I don't know of changing anything, other than updating GPU drivers. The lag spikes are more likely when going to a new area, suggesting it could be loading related. I just tried running CrystalDiskMark on it, and the results are down to SATA SSD levels.

Left image is a bench run I did a moment ago. Right image is one I did shortly after I got the drive. I'm not bothered about sequential, in fact, I'm not sure why it is actually higher now. That's unimportant. The random read speed is why I went Optane, and in short it isn't there now, and I have no idea where to start fixing it.

Ran Intel SSD toolbox. That reported no problems. CrystalDiskInfo similarly came back clean. Drivers listed in Win10 show both for the SSD itself and also NVMe are using Microsoft generic drivers. There are no other drivers offered as far as I'm aware. I have disabled in OS Spectre/Meltdown fixes, in case that might be contributing.

porina · November 18, 2018

A further clue. I tried copying the game files to a SATA SSD. Same lag was present. If anything, even worse. This to me is pointing more to a random Window problem. Similar had happened before on another system with a Samsung NVMe SSD. I never directly fixed it, but it went away with a major Windows version patch. I'll see if I can get 1809 onto the system and see if same happens here.