Optane for non-Optane purposes?

[dgingeri]

OK, so the little Optane drives aren't really good for accelerating higher end NVMe boot and OS drives like a Samsung 960 Pro, however, do you guys think it would still be good for other related purposes?

I've long used the tactic for extending the life and increasing the effective performance of my main drive of putting temp and virtual memory on a separate, cheaper SSD. That way the heaviest write activity, temp files, allows me to just replace a $50-100 cheap drive instead of the $500 main drive, plus I don't have to reinstall my OS because the main OS drive died. Perhaps it is just a wash in the end, in that it just extends the write life of the main SSD by a year for the cost of 1/5 of the drive, but it does decrease certain inconveniences.

So, my latest temp drive (a used 32GB X25-E I picked up from ebay for $40 4 years ago) is now having issues, and probably dying, so I need to do something to replace it. I was thinking maybe an Optane 32GB drive meant for caching might be good for temp files. That module isn't very speedy, but not too terribly expensive, either, at $60 on Amazon, and I do have a M.2 slot that isn't being used currently, and probably won't be.

Think it would be worthwhile? Think it might help some performance as temp files get written faster? Think it might just be a load of hogwash and I should just get another use X25-E?

 

[Blue Fox]

If you're worried about write endurance, it's not really an issue for the kind of workloads one has on their desktop. It's not worth bothering with a second SSD for that purpose.

 

[dgingeri]

If you're worried about write endurance, it's not really an issue for the kind of workloads one has on their desktop. It's not worth bothering with a second SSD for that purpose.

It does improve responsiveness. I do notice that. It takes a bit of the load off the main OS drive and shunts it to the temp drive. Temp files also represent about half the number of writes the OS drive sees under normal operation, so it does have an effect on the write endurance. I think you'd be surprised to see the write numbers from temp files.

 

[ChoGGi]

I use a 2gig ramdrive for my temp folder, works decently other than the odd setup file using more then that

 

[Dreamerbydesign]

It does improve responsiveness. I do notice that. It takes a bit of the load off the main OS drive and shunts it to the temp drive. Temp files also represent about half the number of writes the OS drive sees under normal operation, so it does have an effect on the write endurance. I think you'd be surprised to see the write numbers from temp files.

If you are using a pro grade drive, with a proper warranty, time will almost certainly pass and void the warranty before TBW.

So unless you plan to keep a SSD for 25+ years, this is just irrelevant.

 

[dgingeri]

I use a 2gig ramdrive for my temp folder, works decently other than the odd setup file using more then that

I did actually try that with 4GB of memory. The small size actually caused problems in installing some software and updates.

 

[Blue Fox]

It does improve responsiveness. I do notice that. It takes a bit of the load off the main OS drive and shunts it to the temp drive. Temp files also represent about half the number of writes the OS drive sees under normal operation, so it does have an effect on the write endurance. I think you'd be surprised to see the write numbers from temp files.

You're still greatly exaggerating the kind of impact that that will have on drive life. Very few people even get through 5% of a drive's write endurance in non-enterprise scenarios. I think the responsiveness you're seeing is a placebo and you should actually check your disk activity and queue lengths. Should probably check total GB written too.

The X25-E especially is crap compared to any modern SSD. Since you seem overly concerned about writes, you should consider the fact that not only does a modern SSD (say an Intel 750) have 1/4th the latency, but it also has 100x the write IOPS. If anything, using something like that is actually doing the opposite and hindering performance.