Optane cache now work with secondary storage (HDD in the case of SSD as boot drive) it seem

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

Hello. I just wanted to say that Gigabyte Nordic shared a video on their Facebook group which suggest that a recent software update has made it possibly to use an Optane cache drive as cache for a secondary HDD. That's been possible with SSDs before I think so it made little sense that they wouldn't support it with Optane but they only marketed it and officially supported it on the boot drive before.

That meant that any enthusiast who wanted to use Optane to speed up their secondard storage drive which was an HDD for stuff like games but used an SSD for OS would become disappointed because that configuration wasn't supported or simply ignore it.

To use Optane before one needed to use the HDD as boot drive and many entusiasts doesn't want to do that even though Optane + HDD is pretty fine as boot drive too.

So, on one hand: Yay! Now everyone with a modern Intel PC can add Optane to speed up their HDD too!
On the other hand: Nay! SSD caching was already about equally good for game loading and SSDs cost less so why bother with Optane.

HardOCP thought StoreMI was better than Optane. I totally don't get why. StoreMI seem to be slower on first read and stuff like OS boot doesn't seem to be as much accelerated as HDD + Optane was. I don't know if Intel have any size limits for their solution but the StoreMI which one can use without paying more with X470 is limited. Also I think the Intel solution with Optane warns when you are getting closer to wearing out your Optane drive (though early on in some reviewers case it died quickly) where's I guess crashes may happen more without notice with the StoreMI solution and since it's "not a cache solution" (Optane may not be either) but rather and automatic redistribution of data between the drives the data on whatever drive dies with StoreMI are gone. It's not on the other drive. I think a crash like that is dangerous for the data with the Intel setup too though. Backup is the real solution to the problem in both cases.

[MKS]

An enthusiast will have multiple massive HDDs further divided by multiple volumes. Sadly, it seems Optane memory can only boost ONLY ONE volume among these HDDs, which renders it useless.

[Harry Gumdropzap]

Originally posted by silentmarket:

An enthusiast will have multiple massive HDDs further divided by multiple volumes. Sadly, it seems Optane memory can only boost ONLY ONE volume among these HDDs, which renders it useless.

maybe using raid 0 or raid 10 across the hard drives will work?

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

Optane isn't useless.
You can get a 12 TB WD Gold.
It's not many people who have a larger HDD capacity than that and even if they did already at that the Optane drive would make up 0.267% of the total capacity so it wouldn't be much of your total data on the drive anyway.
How much of a speed boost can you expect if only 1/1000 of your data is on the faster drive? ...

[MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™]

You are confusing things, StoreMI can use optane as the cache drive as well. Not sure what you are really claiming. The system works only as well as the caching software is smart, otherwise the relatively small cache is filled with garbage and regularly flushed. StoreMI is known to be a smart solution, that's why its recommended.

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

Originally posted by MA☝Omgwtfbbqstfu™:

You are confusing things, StoreMI can use optane as the cache drive as well. Not sure what you are really claiming. The system works only as well as the caching software is smart, otherwise the relatively small cache is filled with garbage and regularly flushed. StoreMI is known to be a smart solution, that's why its recommended.

I'm not confusing anything.
And yeah it's no better than the implementation. And AFAIK Intels solution perform much better. It also unlikely destroy peoples data as frequently (seen quite a bit of complaints about that with StoreMI.)

[MKS]

Originally posted by Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism:

Optane isn't useless.
You can get a 12 TB WD Gold.
It's not many people who have a larger HDD capacity than that and even if they did already at that the Optane drive would make up 0.267% of the total capacity so it wouldn't be much of your total data on the drive anyway.
How much of a speed boost can you expect if only 1/1000 of your data is on the faster drive? ...

I think you misunderstand the purpose of Optane memory. It is designed to learn and speed up the file you use most frequently, which it should give every data on the entire HDD the equal opportunity. But if you have several volumes on the HDD. The Optane memory right now can only learn and speed up a specific volume. This is why I don't recommend it. I have 4 Seagate Ironwolf 10TB HDDs. Each HDD is divided by several volumes at the beginning for better-defragging management. Not many people know It is still important to defrag for HDD. But since Optane memory can only do much, the data on my hard drive is merely boosted.

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

Originally posted by silentmarket:

Originally posted by Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism:

Optane isn't useless.
You can get a 12 TB WD Gold.
It's not many people who have a larger HDD capacity than that and even if they did already at that the Optane drive would make up 0.267% of the total capacity so it wouldn't be much of your total data on the drive anyway.
How much of a speed boost can you expect if only 1/1000 of your data is on the faster drive? ...

I think you misunderstand the purpose of Optane memory. It is designed to learn and speed up the file you use most frequently, which it should give every data on the entire HDD the equal opportunity. But if you have several volumes on the HDD. The Optane memory right now can only learn and speed up a specific volume. This is why I don't recommend it. I have 4 Seagate Ironwolf 10TB HDDs. Each HDD is divided by several volumes at the beginning for better-defragging management. Not many people know It is still important to defrag for HDD. But since Optane memory can only do much, the data on my hard drive is merely boosted.

No I haven't misunderstood ♥♥♥♥♥ wouldn't partition the drive for the same OS and see no reason too (though you mention your reason. Defragging with Optane isn't supported though.)
Defragging is less important with NTFS for whatever reason (more clever writes when new data is added?)
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000024018/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html
"I typically run defrag on my HDD to optimize performance. Can I still defragment once it's accelerated with Intel Optane memory?
Once you enable Intel Optane memory, both Intel Optane memory and the accelerated SATA drive appear as one SSD volume to the operating system. As a result, the options for defrag aren't available."

[MKS]

Originally posted by Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism:

Originally posted by silentmarket:

I think you misunderstand the purpose of Optane memory. It is designed to learn and speed up the file you use most frequently, which it should give every data on the entire HDD the equal opportunity. But if you have several volumes on the HDD. The Optane memory right now can only learn and speed up a specific volume. This is why I don't recommend it. I have 4 Seagate Ironwolf 10TB HDDs. Each HDD is divided by several volumes at the beginning for better-defragging management. Not many people know It is still important to defrag for HDD. But since Optane memory can only do much, the data on my hard drive is merely boosted.

No I haven't misunderstood ♥♥♥♥♥ wouldn't partition the drive for the same OS and see no reason too (though you mention your reason. Defragging with Optane isn't supported though.)
Defragging is less important with NTFS for whatever reason (more clever writes when new data is added?)
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000024018/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html
"I typically run defrag on my HDD to optimize performance. Can I still defragment once it's accelerated with Intel Optane memory?
Once you enable Intel Optane memory, both Intel Optane memory and the accelerated SATA drive appear as one SSD volume to the operating system. As a result, the options for defrag aren't available."

It seems like you really don't understand.

The point of my example of setup is Optane can only work with one volume. If you have several volumes. The HDD speed up is useless. And I haven't indicated that you seem only to think of one HDD in the system

And at the beginning, back to the time when Optane isn't developed yet, I made myself a custom defragging script to moving files from different volume, which have zero fragments in your HDD. Not many people can do that actually. And HDD keeps top performance like 200Mb/s read/write all the time.

But this setup is just a simple and usual example why Optane is just a gimmick.

If you really want to lick the ass of Optane, buy one and see it yourself.

[Omega]

I did a quick Google search and it appears that Optane is now indeed able to "accelerate" secondary drives.

I assumed it to have always been able to do this. I guess Optane is even worse then I thought..


I would even argue that SSHDs are better then Optane..

[MKS]

Originally posted by Omega:

I did a quick Google search and it appears that Optane is now indeed able to "accelerate" secondary drives.

I assumed it to have always been able to do this. I guess Optane is even worse then I thought..


I would even argue that SSHDs are better then Optane..

Only the second/ another extra volume

Not the secondary drives, especially not the "drives", only a volume of a drive

[Omega]

Yes, drive. We are assuming the secondary drive to be partitioned with a single partition spanning the entire disk.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000027987/memory-and-storage.html

#SSHDMasterRace
#ILuveMyDriveCache

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

Originally posted by silentmarket:

It seems like you really don't understand.

The point of my example of setup is Optane can only work with one volume. If you have several volumes. The HDD speed up is useless. And I haven't indicated that you seem only to think of one HDD in the system

And at the beginning, back to the time when Optane isn't developed yet, I made myself a custom defragging script to moving files from different volume, which have zero fragments in your HDD. Not many people can do that actually. And HDD keeps top performance like 200Mb/s read/write all the time.

But this setup is just a simple and usual example why Optane is just a gimmick.

If you really want to lick the ass of Optane, buy one and see it yourself.

I do understand.
I wouldn't split up a Windows drive into multiple partitions (beyond the two or whatever the OS installation may do by itself) and as for whatever the fragmentation purpose was to keep a partitions data where you add and remove data often away from one where you write once or for cutting the time it take to run defrag due to smaller size I don't know but running defrag isn't supported when you use Optane so if that's the purpose then just forget about using multiple partitions and then it was solved by itself. Moving files to an empty partition to get them defragmented that way? Sound like an effective way if one got the space left over. I can't really say you could do that with Optane by copying to another harddrive and then back again because the algoritms would move some data around at some times.

Optane is great in making harddrive usage more tolerable and to avoid the high cost of all flash memory storage. Intel Smart Response using SSDs are about as good for games though and SSDs cost less so for the money the Optane may seem like a worse choice.
To me though Intel Smart Response seem like a much better technology than StoreMI. With the Intel solution you get much quicker Windows loads and first ime game loads something StoreMI doesn't seem to deliver. And on reddit people seem to have lost their data with StoreMI so in general StoreMI seem to suck.

I have bought an Optane drive but I returned it mostly because I returned the 8 TB Ironwolf drive because I couldn't decide which one I wanted and because Optane right then only supported creating a combined volume with a boot drive not storage drive. By not as previously said it support usage with a storage drive too. I would be very happy with Optane + a silent reliable HDD using the Intel solution. It seem I would be less happy using the Enmotus solution used by AMD.

Originally posted by Omega:

I did a quick Google search and it appears that Optane is now indeed able to "accelerate" secondary drives.

I assumed it to have always been able to do this. I guess Optane is even worse then I thought..


I would even argue that SSHDs are better then Optane..

Yeah. Many assumed that since it made sense and could be done with SSDs so why not with Optane?
I don't see how that made Optane worse though, it was worse than we thought, but now it do support that so how is it still worse?
SSHDs are totally not better than Optane. Optane is way better. The Optane storage capacity is higher than the flash part of an SSHD and it's faster and you can use a much more reliable drive than the Seagate Firecuda for instance. The 32 GB Optane stick has an endurance rating of 182.5 TB which I guess is higher than for the 8 GB of flash memory in the Firecuda.

Originally posted by silentmarket:

Originally posted by Omega:

I did a quick Google search and it appears that Optane is now indeed able to "accelerate" secondary drives.

I assumed it to have always been able to do this. I guess Optane is even worse then I thought..


I would even argue that SSHDs are better then Optane..

Only the second/ another extra volume

Not the secondary drives, especially not the "drives", only a volume of a drive

Not with multiple Optane sticks?

Originally posted by Omega:

Yes, drive. We are assuming the secondary drive to be partitioned with a single partition spanning the entire disk.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000027987/memory-and-storage.html

#SSHDMasterRace
#ILuveMyDriveCache

Good. Nice with some smart people on Steam.

In Sweden today you can get the 16 core ThreadRipper for less than €600.
Sadly it doesn't support Intel Smart Reponse technology but it do provide lots of PCI-express lanes and have a very attractive price so if one could use one Optane stick per drive with one partition on then it would be all fine even if you used multiple drives. Intel HEDT processors also offer a lot of PCI-express lanes but sadly they cost much much much more.
On the much better Intel mainstream platform though there's boards like the Gigabyte Z370 Gaming 5 which support 3 4x PCI-express 3.0 M.2 drives and Intel should have a card which you can put into one of the graphics slots to create 2 more M.2 drive connections out of 8x PCI-express 3.0 lanes leaving 8x for the graphics card so then you'd have 5 PCI-express 3.0 4x M.2 slots on one Z370 board. Not all that bad even if the CPU only offer 16 lanes + the connection to the chipset.

[Harry Gumdropzap]

guys guys
but what about if you raid 0 or raid 10 the drives

[Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism]

Originally posted by Builderman:

guys guys
but what about if you raid 0 or raid 10 the drives

Atleast optane / intel smart response technology or whatever it's called can't be used with raid (possibly because it is a "raid 0" setup by itself?)

[MKS]

Originally posted by Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism:

I wouldn't split up a Windows drive into multiple partitions

What I should say, I never indicate you should divide a Windows drive. Windows drive is on SSD, normally. I indicate you have multiple large HDDs for data, which Optane can only work with one of them, at most.

Originally posted by Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism:

Not with multiple Optane sticks?

With all the theory you can come up with, you still didn't read the FAQ and Manual on Intel page, of course, without a further test by yourself.

Originally posted by Aliquis Freedom & Ethnopluralism:

Good. Nice with some smart people on Steam.

I guess I'm done here. The definition of smartness for someone on Steam is just searching for recognition, I assume.