Optane cache memory - worth it or not?

OliverQueen

OliverQueen

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 17, 2019
Messages
170
I have been thinking about adding an Intel Optane module of either 16GB or 32GB into the new system, but I don't know if I will see much benefit from doing so. All but the storage drives are SATA6Gbs SSD or vNAND m.2 varients and are fairly rapid compared to the older system that only had standard SATA SSD in it.

Windows 10 takes 5 seconds to boot from cold once past the BIOS screen (BIOS screen takes longer to process than boot time!).

Applications & large files load quick enough & game level loading times are good with games that I have moved onto one of the existing SSD's (ones I play more than others).

I know that it would mean removing the Samsung P981 based m.2 drive from the onboard port & placing it in a slot adaptor (which I already have sitting on the racking anyway).

I have no actual experience with Optane cache technology, so before biting the bullet & getting one, would I see much benefit or performance boost over the system without it? It would be going in the system in my signature, which if it is TL/DR for you;

i7 8700 (non-K)
32GB PC3000 DDR4
Z370 chipset board
GeForce RTX2070
512GB Samsung 970 Pro m.2
512GB Samsung 860 EVO SATAIII
512GB Samsung P981 based m.2 (which will be moved to slot adaptor if Optane module used)
2 x 3GB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 64MB cache HDD (RAID 0)
Windows 10 Home 64bit

What benefits would I be looking at with Optane caching, what size would be best (match per GB to RAM?)? Any drawbacks that I should be aware of?
 
You won't see any benefit.

The biggest improvement people see with Optane Cache is on notebooks with 5400rpm hard drives and no SSD.
 
defaultluser said:
You won't see any benefit.

The biggest improvement people see with Optane Cache is on notebooks with 5400rpm hard drives and no SSD.
Click to expand...

That is what I thought TBH but as had no experience with Optane caching, I thought it was best to get clarification. I have used hybrid SSHD drives in laptops in the past and not noticed any difference TBH (Seagate Momentus drives mainly). I know that the Intel PCIe card based SSD's are mega fast and a little thought was stuck in back of mind thinking that Optane would give m.2 or SATA based SSD's the same performance (or close as to it) as a PCIe Optane SSD.

Saved myself £50 to use on something else more useful like more RGB now :) lol
 
Optane is a lot faster than SSHDs, because it's not a tiny cache attached to a dog-slow drive on a dog-slow SATA6 bus.

Seagate Momentus does all the caching on the drive itself, so you're stuck with whatever dog-slow onboard SSD controller they used. And they really killed any performance gain when they switched to 5400 rpm drives.

Optane actually breaks the rules of Flash, and has fairly fast access times and throughput even for single (16gb) or dual chips (32gb). But those benefits are lost when you have large nvme flash drives.
 
Last edited:
defaultluser said:
Optane is a lot faster than SSHDs, because it's not a tiny cache attached to a dog-slow drive on a dog-slow SATA6 bus.

Seagate Momentus does all the caching on the drive itself, so you're stuck with whatever dog-slow onboard SSD controller they used. And they really killed any performance gain when they switched to 5400 rpm drives.

Optane actually breaks the rules of Flash, and has fairly fast access times and throughput even for single (16gb) or dual chips (32gb). But those benefits are lost when you have large nvme flash drives.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the relatively simple explanation of how Optane caching works. I am surprised that there is a lack of serious information about the technology online as it sounds like it does the job it is designed to do extremely well.

I don't suppose using an Optane m.2 module as a scratch disk for Adobe products would be of much benefit over a normal NVMe m.2 drive?

I might see if I can find a used Optane 32GB cache module and do some experimenting as I could just about justify spending £20 or so on one to mess around with. Even if it means sticking it in a PCIe slot adaptor and using on it on the wife's 4770K system which doesn't have m.2 support at all as a page file drive in Windows only.
 
OliverQueen said:
I have been thinking about adding an Intel Optane module of either 16GB or 32GB into the new system, but I don't know if I will see much benefit from doing so. All but the storage drives are SATA6Gbs SSD or vNAND m.2 varients and are fairly rapid compared to the older system that only had standard SATA SSD in it.

Windows 10 takes 5 seconds to boot from cold once past the BIOS screen (BIOS screen takes longer to process than boot time!).

Applications & large files load quick enough & game level loading times are good with games that I have moved onto one of the existing SSD's (ones I play more than others).

I know that it would mean removing the Samsung P981 based m.2 drive from the onboard port & placing it in a slot adaptor (which I already have sitting on the racking anyway).

I have no actual experience with Optane cache technology, so before biting the bullet & getting one, would I see much benefit or performance boost over the system without it? It would be going in the system in my signature, which if it is TL/DR for you;

i7 8700 (non-K)
32GB PC3000 DDR4
Z370 chipset board
GeForce RTX2070
512GB Samsung 970 Pro m.2
512GB Samsung 860 EVO SATAIII
512GB Samsung P981 based m.2 (which will be moved to slot adaptor if Optane module used)
2 x 3GB Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 64MB cache HDD (RAID 0)
Windows 10 Home 64bit

What benefits would I be looking at with Optane caching, what size would be best (match per GB to RAM?)? Any drawbacks that I should be aware of?
Click to expand...

I picked one up out of curiosity.

Drive is pretty slow vs my 970 1TB, oh and the caching isn't compatible with SSDs.

Speaking of. I need to return this thing to Amazon.

32GB Optane Bench:

IMG_20190507_171326.jpg

970 Pro 1TB Bench:

IMG_20190507_171923.jpg
 
Yeah, the only sales pitch I could see for these things are entry-level OEM systems with terrible hard drives. They can sell it to you factory-configured with a 16GB cache drive for $50 more, and speed things up significantly.

The moment you're opening your own system to add an m.2 card, it's hard to dick around with such limited cache, when drives like these are available for the same price as the 32GB!

https://www.amazon.com/Blue-SN500-5...+blue+m.2&qid=1559452308&s=electronics&sr=1-3

And these failing flash prices mean Optane memory's days are numbered. 128GB flash SSD with 8gb ram for under $400, with no other features cut.

https://www.amazon.com/Dell-Inspiron-15-6-HD-Laptop/dp/B07H52B4XM
 
Last edited:
As an Amazon Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Keljian said:
I did a thing about this a while ago.https://hardforum.com/threads/optane-memory-is-it-for-you-opinion-review.1961497/

What is your workload
Click to expand...

Interesting reading that is for sure.

Workload is mainly working with RAW images in Photoshop, a bit of 1080p video editing in Premiere Pro & playing the odd game such as Diablo III, Starcraft 2, Battlefield 4 & some older games like later C&C/Red Alert titles. The machine is also used as a Plex media server as well (served off the RAID0 array) pushing out mainly 1080p/720p titles across a wired Gigabit network around the house. I like to have the most efficient machine for the hardware I have available on the chosen platform. Back in the day, I would be the one that had 4GB of RAM on a 32bit OS where most people had never thought about going above 256MB or 512MB & running UW-SCSI drives compared to the standard ATA33/66/100. I always try to stay ahead of the norm even if the performance increase is minimal
 
Kwaz said:
I want able to get the Optane software to work with my system. It says that it isn't compatible. I'm running the 970 Pro 1TB and 32GB Optane in NVMe on an Alienware m15 w/ an i7-8750H.

Am I doing something wrong?
Click to expand...

The optane software requires a bios feature enabled (it is named different things for different brands) just buy primocache, it's much more flexible and relatively inexpensive.

OliverQueen said:
Interesting reading that is for sure.

Workload is mainly working with RAW images in Photoshop, a bit of 1080p video editing in Premiere Pro & playing the odd game such as Diablo III, Starcraft 2, Battlefield 4 & some older games like later C&C/Red Alert titles. The machine is also used as a Plex media server as well (served off the RAID0 array) pushing out mainly 1080p/720p titles across a wired Gigabit network around the house. I like to have the most efficient machine for the hardware I have available on the chosen platform. Back in the day, I would be the one that had 4GB of RAM on a 32bit OS where most people had never thought about going above 256MB or 512MB & running UW-SCSI drives compared to the standard ATA33/66/100. I always try to stay ahead of the norm even if the performance increase is minimal
Click to expand...

Ok so you will get minimal benefit with Diablo/SC/BF etc but as my results with final fantasy showed, it'll be pretty marginal. Does 1-4 seconds faster matter?

If you cache the raid array, you will speed it up, do you need it to be faster?

1080p video editing in Premiere pro is one place it will probably give you some benefit if you use it as your scratch disk or cache, but mainly when working with the timeline. If you have enough memory and an Nvidia card (which you do), this is kind of redundant.

I have moved on, I use the optane as my virtual memory drive now and have a 970 evo plus as my primary drive. The optane doesn't confer huge increases in speed as I don't typically run out of ram (32gig) but things feel a bit snappier when I have a lot of apps open and then swap to an app that I haven't used for a bit which has clearly been sent to virtual memory. I also upgraded to a 9700k/32 gig of ram.

If you're looking for a storage speedup, I'd be either:
1. Looking more at swapping your 32 for 64 gig of fast ram, then getting something like primocache and setting it to cache 10-20gig or so of data.
2. Getting a bigger optane 9xxP for a primary drive. Such as this (I have no affiliation with newegg.. just an example) or this
 
Last edited:
So Optane is essentially a trademarked name for a RAMDisk that doesn't use system RAM?
 
Optane is a trademarked name for 3DxPoint ssd technology. The software effectively turns it into cache for slower drives.

The key benefit is random access transfer speed for 4K blocks. The secondary is write endurance.

The “issue” is that Optane “Memory” and Optane 8xx drives only have 2x pci-e 3 lanes, therefore doesn’t have the same maximum throughout as the 9xx nvme or other nvme ssds.

That said, it still has the endurance, and the 4K random write/read speeds, as that bandwidth doesn’t exceed the 2x pci-e bandwidth limitations.
 
Last edited:
I had a 16GB that I slapped the Pagefile on. Kept it for about 6 months now it sits in the pile of stuff that we all have...

Nice low latency but crappy speed.
 
I used a 32 GB Optane drive for my Plex box. Pointed the transcode folder to the drive and it hums along nicely.

Has no problem doing 5 transcoded 1080p stream simultaneously. Anymore than that and I start to get buffering once in a while, but that's on the 8700k, not the drive.

Works great for me since it's a fairly cheap drive with exactly the amount of storage I need, (supposedly) incredible write endurance, and low latency.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top