Thinking about getting Optane memory for my storage HDD?

[Phil2008]

Hi guys, So atm I have a oldish WD Black 640gb hdd for my games, downloads ect and I would like to speed up my games loading times. Having just found out about Optane memory and that they can really speed up a hdd, or so reviews say Im tempted to get the 32gb or 64gb version.

Have any of you guys used this optane memory to speed up your hdd and if so, what do you think about it, is it worth getting over a ssd?

 

[Phil2008]

I think Im going to try the optane memory, because I have been browsing the net and they really do speed up your hard drives even ssd's too once the memory knows your usage pattern. Also the optane memory doesnt speed up all the drives, only the ones you select in the software.

Think I'll get the 32gb version as the 64gb version is over twice the price, then if its any good I will upgrade when prices are lower.

Hopefully it will just speed up the things I use and not pointless stuff on my storage drive, because the windows catche/superfetch is terrible for that. Having just got another 16gb of memory, I have seen windows using over 16gb for the catche

 

[TheVoice]

Personally I'd put the money towards a decent capacity 500GB SSD for about £60 to use for your games, and leave the HDDs for for downloads, media etc.

 

[Phil2008]

delete post

 

[Armageus]

Personally I'd put the money towards a decent capacity 500GB SSD for about £60 to use for your games, and leave the HDDs for for downloads, media etc.

Exactly this - a 32gb Optane M2 costs around £48 - for £12 more you could have a 480gb ssd

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x TeamGroup 480GB L5 Lite SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 3D NAND Solid State Drive= £59.99

Total: £68.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)
​

they really do speed up your hard drives even ssd's too once the memory knows your usage pattern

They certainly won't speed up SSDs (if anything they will increase latency as another layer to "go through"), and even the claimed benchmarks for HDD's are generally flawed/biased.

Yes Optane will work to some degree (in the same way the Seagate hybrid drives do - e.g. browsing hard drives etc are quicker as directory information is cached), but you will be disappointed if you expect it to make much difference to game load times - 32GB is barely enough to cache 1 game these days, let alone a whole hard drive full.

 

[Distracted]

I was looking at this, ever since they added the ability to cache secondary non boot drives.

My boot drive is a 1tb nvme so it needs no acceleration but my storage is an 8tb hdd.

Der8auer tested optane recently to speed up his own storage and has since decided to use it. I've seen plenty of other user reports for secondary drives where optane has showed large performance increases.

Personally i intend to get it but it is low on my list of priorities due to other pc related expenses. I don't know which size i will be getting.

 

[Phil2008]

I ordered the 32gb optane memory, as I dont really want to fill up my pc with loads of drives and increasing my energy bills. Also my next upgrade hopefully will be a larger storage drive, so depending how well the optane speeds up the hard drive, it will be a larger ssd or hdd for the storage drive on my list.

My board has 2 m2 slots but if I use the slot that is easy to get to, the 2nd pcie 16x slot gets disabled and the other slot is partly underneath the heatsink. So hopefully I will be able to wiggle it in without removing the cpu heatsink.

The optane memory only woks with 7th/8th gen intel systems (the version for amd is called "StoreMI"), you can only select what drive you want it speed up with 370 motherboards or higher, oh yeah it only works on windows10.... Why do manufactures do this hey, as I think more people would benefit using optane on older slower systems.

Exactly this - a 32gb Optane M2 costs around £48 - for £12 more you could have a 480gb ssd

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x TeamGroup 480GB L5 Lite SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 3D NAND Solid State Drive= £59.99

Total: £68.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)
​

I was looking at the 1tb version of this and the price is very tempting and I will look at this again if the optane is rubbish.. But years ago ssd speeds wernt great at reading compressed data as they compressed the data to acheve the fast read speeds and games are already are compressed. So I dont know if this applies to cheap ssd drives?

They certainly won't speed up SSDs (if anything they will increase latency as another layer to "go through"), and even the claimed benchmarks for HDD's are generally flawed/biased.

Yes Optane will work to some degree (in the same way the Seagate hybrid drives do - e.g. browsing hard drives etc are quicker as directory information is cached), but you will be disappointed if you expect it to make much difference to game load times - 32GB is barely enough to cache 1 game these days, let alone a whole hard drive full.

Apparently 32gb is plenty even for huge hdds, as it only stores the stuff you access mostly and people say that they do speed up the normal sata ssd drive as the optane is much faster at reading as the sata3 controller has a limit of about 500mb/s

Look at a few reviews of optane guys,, I thought what a load of toss, but as I read up on it more it started sounding good,, but I will let you guys know if its rubbish or not. hopefully not, but knowing my luck it will be.

 

[Armageus]

I ordered the 32gb optane memory, as I dont really want to fill up my pc with loads of drives and increasing my energy bills.

Any SSD isn't going to increase your energy bill by a noticeable amount, and if you replaced that old 640GB HD with an SSD then you'd actually save energy. With regards to not filling up your PC, you can get "normal" SSDs in M2 form factor for not much more cost e.g.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

• 1 x WD Blue 3D NAND 500GB M.2 2280 6Gbps Solid State Drive (WDS500G2B0B)= £76.99

Total: £85.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)​

​

A 500GB SSD (Sata or M2) can also be reused further down the line, or moved to a different device (e.g. laptop). A 32GB SSD is going to be useless down the line (especially if Intel drop the optane software as they have with other features previously).

I was looking at the 1tb version of this and the price is very tempting and I will look at this again if the optane is rubbish.. But years ago ssd speeds wernt great at reading compressed data as they compressed the data to acheve the fast read speeds and games are already are compressed. So I dont know if this applies to cheap ssd drives?

That was a side effect of a specific type of SSD Controller (Sandforce) - recent SSDs (i.e. last 5 years at least) don't suffer from that issue.

Apparently 32gb is plenty even for huge hdds, as it only stores the stuff you access mostly and people say that they do speed up the normal sata ssd drive as the optane is much faster at reading as the sata3 controller has a limit of about 500mb/s

32GB might be plenty, it might not be - it all depends on your use case. If you use 1 or 2 games constantly and nothing else, then probably fine, however start swapping between a lot of different apps and the cached data becomes useless as it will be emptied too regularly.

Regards the 500mb/s part, NVME M2 SSD drives are what overcome that limit not specifically Optane.

Look at a few reviews of optane guys,, I thought what a load of toss, but as I read up on it more it started sounding good,, but I will let you guys know if its rubbish or not. hopefully not, but knowing my luck it will be.

I'll be interested to see what it's like in "real world" use, rather than a few repeated benchmarks that are what have been used in the reviews. From real world experience of a Seagate Hybrid Drive (admittedly only 8gb cache on a 1tb drive), was disappointing on the whole.

 

[Phil2008]

The sandforce ssd drive was my first ssd drive I bought, it was called "bigfoot 3.5" 80gb ssd drive" and cost £150. All other peoples ssd's were going wrong. I had mine for a good few yrs and it was real reliable, then sold it on when I bought the samsung pro 120gb ssd.

Im thinking 32gb is rather on the small side too, but for catching intel says its enough and thats why intel is kind of slow bringing larger ones out.. I have seen the 64gb version you can buy, but on the intel website, it only shows the 16gb and 32gb versions. So Im guessing the 64gb version that I have seen around on the net probably isn't the real deal.

Anyway guys if its rubbish, I'll just sell it and get a 1tb sdd if I can scrap up £150, or buy a decent WD Black 1 or 2tb hdd.

 

[Phil2008]

The optane memory came today, managed to get it plugged in without having to remove the heatsink, my sister put it in for me as she has small hands.

Setting it up was easy as it did it its self more or less, but on opening the optane software the bootdrive (ssd) was only showing and in use with the optane memory, my hdd was nowhere in sight. But I read reviews saying that the optane will only work with drives that use GPT partitions not MBR partitions.... So thats what I have been doing for the last few hrs, moving the data off the hard drive so I can format it as GPT so the optane will hopefully see the drive.

So I thought while the drive is empty I might aswel do a secure erase before formatting it. So fingers and toes crossed the hard drive will show up in the optane software after I have done this messing about and re-enabling the optane memory again.

It was lucky I stumbled on reviews saying optane only work on GPT partitioned drives or I probably never of figured out that.

 

[Distracted]

That's a pain. I hope it all works out.

 

[Phil2008]

Well guys I have finally got the Optane paired up with my hard drive.. I was using the latest software and driver from the intel site but it was dated 2017 and optane came out about then and didnt have any support to select the drive you wanted to use. So I ended up using the optane software and driver from the motherboards website and finally it showed up the 640gb hard drive.

I have had a quick play and on the 2nd loading up of dirt rally, Id say it decreased my loading time by 75% and I even restarted windows to make sure it wasn't being helped from the cacheing or anything from windows. I ran dirt rally again as soon as windows had boot and it still loaded up stupidly fast.

I did the same with a older game "half-life 2 lost cost", for some reason it takes a good 5 secs or longer to load up normally, but loading it up on the 2nd time with the optane, it was at the menu screen in about 1-2 secs.

But yeah with it just being 32gb it will only be able to hold a few games, but then again I dont really play a whole range of games in a short space of time and it will only kick the stuff/games off that I use the least anyway.

So first impressions are good, but what about day to day use.... I'll keep you posted.

 

[edscdk]

If you ate worried about ssds using too much power you best of make sure you poo before going to work to save on fuel as well... Huge mistake you should have got a 500gb ssd.fir another £12!

 

[AMDPower]

i agree with other send optane back and get 500GB SSD, you will regret and SSD use much less power than normal hd. 4w or thereabouts.