StoreMI, Load time accaleration on Ryzen 2### series tested.

humbug · 11 May 2018 at 17:09

I suspect this is probably something very few know about, even those who own Ryzen 2### with 400 series Chipsets.

StoreMI, new with Ryzen 2 / 400 series Chipsets turns your slow mechanical HDD into SSD level performance by meshing your mass storage mechanical drive together with your SSD by intelligently moving the critical parts of the application that take a long time to load to the faster SSD.
You can have, or in fact the best way to do this is to have your OS installed on your mass storage mechanical drive.
StoreMI will treat the Mechanical drive and the SSD as one drive and automatically move the files around for the best possible performance.

Normally this is something that i would overlook, i would pigeon hole it as bloatware. But this adds actual value, its actually useful, and it works really well not just for convenience and performance but you also don't have to chose between which games to put on the fast drive and which on the slow drive, this just puts it all on this one virtual mass storage fast drive.

gavinh87 · 11 May 2018 at 17:34

Any decent reviews of this?

minizx · 11 May 2018 at 19:22

https://youtu.be/wbl2dYgjMQ4

Level1tech have a video that goes into a little more detail I think he used intel optane to test it too

orbitalwalsh · 11 May 2018 at 19:49

Picked up optane for £15 . Won't get to try it all out till Monday/Tuesday .
Have 250ssd with windows ready to go haha
Could clone onto 2TB HDD as well to see

humbug · 11 May 2018 at 22:00

minizx said:
https://youtu.be/wbl2dYgjMQ4

Level1tech have a video that goes into a little more detail I think he used intel optane to test it too

Thanks, added to OP

MasterOC · 12 May 2018 at 09:37

Did look into this and download the software , but just get entier serivice is busy . sooo that quickly got uninstalled. will have another butchers enight

Journey · 12 May 2018 at 13:20

This has been around a while, and is very nice software. It works on all AMD Ryzen/Threadripper platforms, not just 400 series chipsets, but you would need to pay $19.99 for it if you are not on X470

You can check http://www.enmotus.com/amd for the detailed lowdown on the software, and the requirements, basically it's AM4/TR4 system, if you fancy paying a bit more $59.99 you can get the Fuzedrive Plus which allows SSD partitions up to 1TB (instead of 128GB) and 4GB FuzeRAM.

Here's the FAQ from Enmotus

Hotwired · 12 May 2018 at 13:29

Sounds like a more flexible version of those HDD with a little SDD glued in.

sdavlaws · 12 May 2018 at 14:24

From the videos it seams to work surprisingly well after a few start cycles. I am going to give it a go when my new case turns up, hopefully it will save me some money on not having to buy a large SSD for my games can just reuse my old sata SSD to give them a pick me up

opethdisciple · 12 May 2018 at 18:04

Clever piece of technology that. Probably not for me as I'd rather just run my games from an SSD. I always keep my number of installed games down anyway so space is generally not an issue.

But none the less it's definitely a useful piece of software.

Although he said that StoreMI makes the 2700x more compelling over the 8700k I thought Intel had their own version of this software? Optane or something?

humbug · 12 May 2018 at 18:11

opethdisciple said:
Clever piece of technology that. Probably not for me as I'd rather just run my games from an SSD. I always keep my number of installed games down anyway so space is generally not an issue.

But none the less it's definitely a useful piece of software.

Although he said that StoreMI makes the 2700x more compelling over the 8700k I thought Intel had their own version of this software? Optane or something?

That Optian thing is a combination of Intel software and Intel's Optain drives, only its nothing like as good, you can use this with Optain drives, to Quote Windle "..........If you have an Optain Drive i think you should totally do that, i think you might be disturbed, and i do have to giggle a little bit, that AMD nailed the experience here with Optain... its a good experience and they did it better than the people who came up with Optain."

https://youtu.be/wbl2dYgjMQ4?t=12m57s

The thing is this works with any drive, you don't need an "AMD branded drive"

bru · 13 May 2018 at 03:00

humbug said:
The thing is this works with any drive, you don't need an "AMD branded drive"

Surely this needs an AMD Ryzen 400 series chipset, whereas an Intel Optane drive will work with any chipset, so just as limiting but in a different way.

Its good that they give it away for free with the 400 series chipsets though and it does seem to work quite well in those videos.

humbug · 13 May 2018 at 10:04

bru said:
Surely this needs an AMD Ryzen 400 series chipset, whereas an Intel Optane drive will work with any chipset, so just as limiting but in a different way.

Its good that they give it away for free with the 400 series chipsets though and it does seem to work quite well in those videos.

Yeah, fair enough

opethdisciple · 13 May 2018 at 15:51

Don't forget you can buy it separately. It doesn't just require an X470 series mobo.

David Bisset · 13 May 2018 at 19:28

While it's nice etc I'm well past the point of using non-ssd storage. For the people I know who still heavily use spinny discs I suspect the possibility of needing to get their hands dirty setting it up would make it a no-go

tho I'm sure there will be many who do find it useful. Had it been available 3 or 4 years ago I'd probably have been more personally interested.

KiNgPiN83 · 14 May 2018 at 09:50

Its nice to see these sorts of things filtering down to the home user as its something that most enterprise storage devices have been doing for a while now. It does sound a bit like HP's old adaptive optimisation where it learns what is hot and moves it appropriately. (Although dynamic would be better as it wouldn't need to learn and would do it on the fly.) Still, as has been said above SSD has gripped me and i'd rather just stick to using those for stuff i want to work quickly and spinning disks for backup/work that doesnt need to be quick access. I think i have an OS/programs NVME, a gaming SSD and a bog standard HD for slow stuff. (Then a big USB drive to backup the lot)

Still in saying the above, if it starts to get adopted and used it will only get better.

DragonQ · 14 May 2018 at 11:13

David Bisset said:
While it's nice etc I'm well past the point of using non-ssd storage. For the people I know who still heavily use spinny discs I suspect the possibility of needing to get their hands dirty setting it up would make it a no-go tho I'm sure there will be many who do find it useful. Had it been available 3 or 4 years ago I'd probably have been more personally interested.

Yes, I think it's definitely getting close to the point where your main OS drive is an M.2 SSD and your huge 50+ GiB games can reside on a SATA SSD. HDDs are really not needed for anything outside of mass storage (mainly video and backups). The only reason I still have an HDD in my desktop is because I use it as a scratch drive for basic video editing and recording, neither of which is bottlenecked by the HDD, and changing it would be an unnecessary expense.

Also, I've always been suspicious of the extra wear these kinds of solutions exert on your components. Surely if it's constantly moving stuff between SSD and HDD in order to ensure your most/recently used applications are on the SSD (or in RAM), your SSD is going to endure a lot more write cycles than it would normally?

KiNgPiN83 · 14 May 2018 at 13:45

DragonQ said:
Also, I've always been suspicious of the extra wear these kinds of solutions exert on your components. Surely if it's constantly moving stuff between SSD and HDD in order to ensure your most/recently used applications are on the SSD (or in RAM), your SSD is going to endure a lot more write cycles than it would normally?

I guess it depends on whether the optimisation is on the fly or its learning first and then moving later. If its on the fly its going to have more data moves going on i guess. It probably also depends on how often it drops stuff out of SSD. I.e. does it drop it once the SSD is full? Drop it back down after a week? a day? etc.

Edit: Decided to actually read about it and it does it in real time. I also like the 2GB RAM cache tier for really fast stuff. It sounds pretty good but i'll let it mature abit before i dabble as i dont want to break my PC as its working fine.

bru · 14 May 2018 at 18:39

opethdisciple said:
Don't forget you can buy it separately. It doesn't just require an X470 series mobo.

Sorry but it does require a 400 series board.

What are the system requirements? Your system must meet the minimum configuration: AMD socket AM4 processor and Socket AM4 motherboard with a 4xx-series chipset, with 4G RAM (6G RAM to support the RAM cache), and the Windows 10 operating system. StoreMI for AMD Ryzen Desktop is supported on AMD Ryzen/Aseries/Athlon™ Desktop Processors (in socket AM4 motherboards).

AMD Store IM FAQ

tamzzy · 14 May 2018 at 18:43

what happens if one of the drive dies?