Intel's Optane in PCs is as good as it will get for years, says analyst Memory-centric analyst firm TrendFocus reckons Intel's Optane is going to take years to make a difference in the data centre, which means using it in PCs is as good as it will get for the foreseeable future. The good news is that Optane screams in PCs: the firm cites a Gamespot review to assert that a PC with Optane and a 1TB …
But that Gamespot review is mostly comparing against traditional HHDs, with only passing mention to SSDs, and when it does talk about them it makes speed comparisons with SATA units, not M.2.
Optane seems to be at best only a small improvement over SSD, and at worst a disappointment.
Have another coffee Steve! Yeah, you're right in that SSDs will be faster than a Optane + spinning rust setup. However, the point of the article was that a 1TB Optane + rust setup was no slouch, and yet still much cheaper than a pure SSD setup of the same capacity.
The second point of the article was that this isn't suitable for reinvigorating older PCs, because Optane requires newer Intel CPUs. Also, the spinning rust is more suited to desktops than it the laptops that many people use as their primary computer.
To quote the article "the firm cites a Gamespot review to assert that a PC with Optane and a 1TB, 7,200 RPM spinning rust hard was four to eight times faster than a solid state disk at read-heavy tasks data."
Gamespot said no such thing. They made only limited comparisons with SATA SSDs, and you can pick up a 500GB SATA drive for not much more than the Optane + 1TB combo.
It's not a replacement for SSD. It's a caching solution for keeping HDD relevant - so more a replacement for hybrids. An M2 SSD is still going to be the better option if cash isn't a problem, but Optane+HDD will beat SSD on $/GB hands-down while still being a lot quicker than just HDD.
Anandtech did a review a few days ago:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/11210/the-intel-optane-memory-ssd-review-32gb-of-kaby-lake-caching
The supplied Optane module didn't make it through testing:
After about a day of benchmarking the Optane Memory review system locked up, and after rebooting the Optane Memory module was not detected and the OS installation was corrupted beyond repair.
As pointed out by the reviewer, this isn't completely unknown when testing things, and may just be a case of bad luck.
But, it's worth bearing in mind until more real world endurance results come in.
Personally I run a couple of 512GB SSDs in a RAID 0 stripe.. tops out at around 1100MB/s and gives me plenty of space for OS and most applications.. On top of that I have a RAID 0 with 2x 2TB SSHD for storage, and a 6TB Western Digital Red for backup. I also have a 60GB SLC SSD which is used for page file and temp files in order to prevent unnecessary wear to the larger SSDs.
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"I'm going to upvote you for the idea about using a smaller ssd for the pagefile"
I'm not. Smaller drives have lower endurance. If you have enough ram pagefile isn't touched anyway.
As for Raid0 - it's great if you like your system hand-grenading from time to time but otherwise only use it for caches.
"Smaller drives have lower endurance."
Surely that's irrelevant if the drive is only used for the page file, though? This way, when his page drive craps out, he just swaps in a new one with no need to shuffle data around. And since he can just use a 64 gig SSD for it, it's cheap, cheerful and avoids wrecking a much more expensive drive with pointless swap ops.
bcache has been doing things like that with big disk / small SSD setups quite nicely ... on any processor the kernel runs on and with any type or brand of block device.
I use an NVM card as the cache device, which has of course zero wear to really speed up a DB, and with SSDs it gives quite a nice KVM environment.
So, what's this all about with WIndows only and newest Intel CPUs only?
If you are going to be spending the money on a latest (7th gen) model CPU then you probably have money in the budget for a good NVMe M.2 SSD (or at least a good SATA SSD).
The Hybrid unit idea is a re-hash from a couple years ago, and offers all the same pitfalls as previously.
Sluggish performance once you start doing anything requiring large amounts of read / write
Buggy when using "alternative" OSes, but probably works okay with Windows 10
Spinning HDD pulling more power
Spinning HDD likely to die if it gets dropped
Cost savings of maybe $100?
Not worth it.
Depends on your workload. Flash storage is notorious for poor performance with small random access and low queue depths. NVMe doesn't fix that, I saw microscopic change moving from SATA SSD to fast MVMe M2. This Optane incarnation is good at those access patterns, but doesn't improve with larger reads.
For some workloads Optane could crush any NVMe flash device (for now). Just can't imagine what they are because the drivers aren't likely to actually cache data files.
(4kB random r/w) "Again, Optane really eclipses the standalone hard drive here. Whereas the HDD reached random read and write speeds of .5MB/s and 1.7MB/s, respectively, Optane averaged 126.3 MB/s and 196.8 MB/s. Those are orders of magnitude faster performances."
A decent SATA SSD (SM863) will go _at least_ twice as fast as the Optane+HDD combo, let alone if you use a decent NVMe device - and they're simply not particularly expensive in smaller sizes (256 or 512Gb)
This really is a solution in search of a problem that was solved years ago. If this is all Optane is good for then Flash will continue to eat its lunch.
Now, what if someone sets up a bcache with Optane+NVMe drive? Worthwhile or a pile of fetid dingo kidneys?
That mostly matters for sequential throughput, and if you want to write faster than the 600 GB/sec that SATA is capable of you shouldn't be trying to accelerate a hard drive, you should be using an SSD (or striping multiple SSDs if you really want to go fast)
Yeah, the latency also improves not going through SATA, but again if you need latency measured in microseconds, using a fast cache on a hard drive is very much the wrong approach no matter how fast that cache is.
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