Optane "memory" worth it?

I guess once you go ubove like 800mb/s you dont notice much difference...

Plus your cpu, motherboard, memory might be a bottleneck once you go over a speed. Even the operating system as stupid as that sounds might be bottlenecking also..

But 600mb/s is plenty fast enough for a boot drive as most apps that doesn't take a lot of processing power opens up instantly anyway. But I have never used a ssd for my games drive, only this optane, that makes a huge difference then just with a regular spinning hard drive on its own.
 
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The only time I've found NVME to noticably be faster than a SATA SSD is with really heavy DB work or a crap load of VMs.

SATA drives have a single command queue with a queue depth of 32 commands, full fat NVME drives can handle 65K+ queues with 65K+ commands per queue.
 
I have had no trouble with my "32gb optane memory" since having it just before xmas time, just pop it in, set it up, forget about it and it does its thing. Cutting down game loading times in half on my old 640GB WD black hdd..

So I am really thinking of buying the "280gb optane 900p" with the M.2 cable, and pairing it up with a nice WD black/gold 4tb drive as my games/storage drive.

https://www.tomshardware.co.uk/intel-rst-driver-16.0.2-optane,news-58178.html
 
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I really do not know why reviewers revew the 900p/905p drives as SSDs, as they dont really shine being used in this way mainly down to the price. But its a whole different ball game using them as cache for HDDs. A 10tb HDD can be as quick or faster than a standard SSD with one of these puppies.
 
Distracted said:
I bought an optane drive to speed up an 8tb hdd that stores my 600+ games.
Seems like the ideal use for it.
Click to expand...

the only problem is it cant speed up all the data on the drive, only what will fit on the cache drive.

the problem is, people are buying 16gb or 32gb and when you have games like BT V, COD, flight sim the drive cant load even one of the games.
the game will boot fasted but the rest of the game will be as slow as before

for the same price as a 64gb cache drive you could buy a 500gb SSD and run it as cache.. that would actually load some files
 
MaXxBoulton said:
the only problem is it cant speed up all the data on the drive, only what will fit on the cache drive.

the problem is, people are buying 16gb or 32gb and when you have games like BT V, COD, flight sim the drive cant load even one of the games.
the game will boot fasted but the rest of the game will be as slow as before

for the same price as a 64gb cache drive you could buy a 500gb SSD and run it as cache.. that would actually load some files
Click to expand...

I'm aware of the limitations of optane, this is why I think it is ideal for my steam library etc.
I have my frequently used games on an ssd, however I have another 600+ games stored on spinning rust that i have never played or rarely play. They are stored in case I or anyone else wants quick access to them without having to download them but putting all of them on an SSD would be incredibly expensive and is unnecessary.

Occasionally I will pick up a game from the library and play it for a while, in which case the game gets cached and runs really well. My optane drive is 100gb or there abouts so it will cache an entire game without issue. I usually play a game to completion and then switch at which point I no longer need the previous game cached, just the one I am currently playing.

I may look into using a regular SSD for cache in the future, however I'm satisfied with optane right now.
 
Distracted said:
r I have another 600+ games stored on spinning rust
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How big is the modal your running, to cache the boot data for 600 games.

JasonM said:
The optain module only has to store the most regular used data to give a good speed improvement.
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thats right but you only get a "good speed improvement" on the "most regular used data". but as said by @Distracted he using to cache the data for 600 games, this is not how optain is intended to be used and will not work.

the idea is a little home system, for general use. optain loads the system boot files, say chrome and so on to give a more responsive system on a budget(lol) but even than a 128gb SSD would be better and cost less.
 
MaXxBoulton said:
no it cant. only in the info cached can be as fast. and if your using a 10tb drive i am going to have a bet a 128gb cache drive cant load all the data.
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Your only using a small percentage of your drive 2-3 games that you use regularly and a 280gb optane I would say would be able to fit 10+ games on easy..

Once a game gets run once,, its copied on to the optane and it wont get deleted until the optane is full, so aslong as the game is on the optane, it will run from the optane and not the hdd.
 
Phil2008 said:
Your only using a small percentage of your drive 2-3 games that you use regularly and a 280gb optane I would say would be able to fit 10+ games on easy.. Once a game gets run once,, its copied on to the optane and wont get deleted until the optane is full, so aslong as the game is on the optane, it will run from the optane and not the hdd.
Click to expand...

But on the other hand if you only use 2-3 games regularly, you could just buy an appropriate sized SSD and install them on it
 
Armageus said:
But on the other hand if you only use 2-3 games regularly, you could just buy an appropriate sized SSD and install them on it
Click to expand...

Na, I like a decent collection of games on my pc, plus I use the drive for downloads and stuff too.. I think whatever you copy yourself to the drive gets also copied to the optane, because I have noticed that if I copy something to the hdd and then move/copy it to the ssd, it copies/moves it stupidly fast.
 
Distracted said:
Occasionally I will pick up a game from the library and play it for a while, in which case the game gets cached and runs really well. My optane drive is 100gb or there abouts so it will cache an entire game without issue. I usually play a game to completion and then switch at which point I no longer need the previous game cached, just the one I am currently playing.

I may look into using a regular SSD for cache in the future, however I'm satisfied with optane right now.
Click to expand...

MaXxBoulton said:
How big is the modal your running, to cache the boot data for 600 games.


thats right but you only get a "good speed improvement" on the "most regular used data". but as said by @Distracted he using to cache the data for 600 games, this is not how optain is intended to be used and will not work.

the idea is a little home system, for general use. optain loads the system boot files, say chrome and so on to give a more responsive system on a budget(lol) but even than a 128gb SSD would be better and cost less.
Click to expand...

Phil2008 said:
Once a game gets run once,, its copied on to the optane and it wont get deleted until the optane is full, so aslong as the game is on the optane, it will run from the optane and not the hdd.
Click to expand...
 

soo the 600 games will fit on the 100gb optane drive?NO, then ever time you start a different game it will remove the last one you played and load that on the optane

to get the optane speed benefit you need to be hitting the same files over and over. if you randomly play the 600 games it will load then from the HDD as a slower than standard speed because it also loaded it to the optane drive. its been show the first time you load a file its slower and get faster ever time you reload it until its overwritten by new cache data then the speed up posses starts again
 
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Armageus said:
But on the other hand if you only use 2-3 games regularly, you could just buy an appropriate sized SSD and install them on it
Click to expand...

this is my point, a 100gb optane drive is about £140..(google price), you can pick up a 1tb ssd for £100..
280gb optane drive is about £270..(again google price) you can pick up a 2tb SSD for this price..
 
There are a couple of things people are missing with Optane.

1) Optane caches random access files as priority over large files. So when people are talking about games, say a game has a 1GB data file that large sequential file will remain on the HDD, however the small files such as your DLL's and config files they will be moved to the Optane.

The above is very smart as you get a RAID 0 effect, as there is potential for data reads from both the Optane and HDD simultaneously.

2) The second thing people don't understand is data on Optane is compressed, and compression is typically anything from 1-16 times. The delay in de-compression is pretty quick (compared to compression) as most of the IO on an Optain module will be read hits (other words de-compressing) the extra CPU power used de-compressing is worth the cost given more data can be cached.
 

There is plenty of evidence out in the wild to support the use case of using optane for a large secondary drive.

It is possible to take a very large hdd and with optane accelerate that drive to ssd levels of performance.

This is the last I'm going to be saying on the topic. The info is a quick google away. Intel has their own optane and gaming page and independent reviewers have tested the tech.

I'm not sure if this is getting lost in translation or people are just arguing for the sake of arguing but I'm out.

Op, i hope you are able to find the info you are looking for.
 
Its not hard to figure out how it works guys......When you first install the optane and link it up with the hdd, whatever you run from that hdd will get stored onto the optane untill its full. Then once its full it will start deleting the stuff you dont use much. So in theory if the optane is nice and large, most of your stuff you run will be nice and fast.
 
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