7

I am confused about intel Optane. I plan to use an

  • ASUS Prime Z590-A mobo with
  • intel i5-11600 CPU and
  • intel 670P 2280 NVMe 512GB M.2 SSD.

I've read that Optane is a special tech to speed up OS loading, and applications start, but I have a feeling that all of this makes sense if the storage is not SSD, but HDD...

Question

Does buying/adding/using intel Optane make sense in my case?

Improve this question
3
  • Note that Intel Optane-only SSDs are being discontinued tomshardware.com/news/…
    – Gantendo
    Commented Nov 17, 2021 at 10:32
  • 1
    Intel Optane drives are basically useless when a NVMe SSD exists in the system. Optane drives can only be used as a cache. They were discontinued for a reason and Optane never saw faster and product iteration in its entire lifespan
    – Ramhound
    Commented Nov 17, 2021 at 13:10
  • Optane is basically the SSD equivalent of Intel's Itanium CPU: in theory superior, but beaten competitors that had economy of scale.
    – MSalters
    Commented Nov 18, 2021 at 14:30

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
14

Optane is, I believe, a fancy name for fast SSD used for caching. There is little point in adding it to your system as your SSD is very fast and pretty similar in effect- see https://community.intel.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives/Acceleration-of-new-670p-using-intel-optane-memory/m-p/1276119

If I had money to burn on Optane in this case I'd throw it at more memory instead.

Improve this answer
7
  • 4
    This was my take too. Optane is best suited for systems with conventional HDDs and maybe SATA SSDs and is used to cache regularly used programs and parts of the OS. In systems with an NVME SSD it borders on useless.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Nov 17, 2021 at 11:17
  • Many thx. One problem less :-)
    – g.pickardou
    Commented Nov 17, 2021 at 16:14
  • It was always bizarre to me that Optane was pushed to consumers at all. The workloads that crave what's essentially non-volatile dram at the price point Optane is at are miles away from anything that makes sense for the home and even prosumer market.
    – Chuu
    Commented Nov 17, 2021 at 22:38
  • 1
    @Chuu Delineating consumer vs prosumer markets are how we got to the situation where ECC ram support and memory overclocking are premium features that are locked out unless you pay for more expensive chipsets. Sure, Optane does nothing for your AAA gaming rig. But for large software compilation workloads, where the entire working set can reach hundreds of gigabytes (looking at you Scala), Optane is a massive boon. But I wouldn't want to pay for a Xeon just to use one...
    – Aron
    Commented Nov 18, 2021 at 6:26
  • 1
    @Chuu There is no such thing as non-volatile DRAM. There's non-volatile RAM based on phase-change memory also marketed under the Optane brand. But DRAM is, by its nature, volatile.
    – idmean
    Commented Nov 18, 2021 at 9:15
0

This entire comment section is incorrect and ignorant. Anyone who has done side by side comparison of SSDs vs SSD + Optane knows that the latter is superior.

The reason is self explanatory. Unfortunately intel discontinued the product, but the low depth queue read and write speeds are VASTLY superior to NAND Flash, and I mean it absolutely trounces it, that is my PCIE 3.0 Optane 905P SSD from 2018 outperforms your brand new top of the line NVME PCIE 5.0 NAND Flash SSD in 9 out 10 of the most common day to day tasks you use your hard drive for.

Why is this? Well simply because MOST things your system uses your SSD for are random read and writes, not sequential read and writes. Big numbers make for good advrtisements though, and giant read write numbers look amazing, even though none of you have the internet bandwidth necessary to take advantage of the write speed of your brand new PCIE 5.0 SSDs anyway, so the number is meaningless.

That said, I can't even imagine going back to NAND flash alone anymore, the 1-2 seconds of lag you take for granted when clicking on an application because you think thats SOOO FAST is jarring for me because everything is literally instantaneous on my computer, unlike yours. It may be a dinosaur, but the truth is its just plain faster.

Fortunately, you can have the best of both worlds. Using optane as a cache drive on a modern SSD gives you the advantages of that low queue depth random read and write via RST while also letting you fill your SSD up in 10 seconds if you can find an interface with enough throughput to manage that much data all at once.

Anyway, the reason I can safely say the entire comment section is full of ignorant idiots is because this was the core of your question:

"I've read that Optane is a special tech to speed up OS loading, and applications start, but I have a feeling that all of this makes sense if the storage is not SSD, but HDD..."

The answer to this segment the only part that really was coming close to a question is this:

  • Your "feeling" is wrong, Optane is a different type of SSD than the SSD in your system.
  • Yes optane would increase the speed of HDD's but it will also increase the random read writes of SSDs as well.
  • Most importantly, the only metrics you provided as a means to answer your question, YES Optane will speed up OS loading, and applications start times compared to just an SSD alone if you use it as a drive cache with RST. It will also marginally speed up 99% of your daily computing tasks that do anything touching your drives because nearly all such tasks are random reads.
  • Given the above was the only solid metric you gave to measure whether it was a good choice to buy optane or not by, either we'd have to read your mind and assume a bunch of BS, or measure by those metrics, and by those metrics, your false assumption aside, Optane does make sense to buy if you want increased speed from your boot time, startup time, OS operation, and application startup, loadscreens, and tasks within applications.

Unfortunately, the tech industry is filled with a bunch of blustering idiots who don't know a thing about the technology they spout on about acting like they're experts. Too bad.

Learn yourself something, and get some optane drives before they sell out in case someone in the industry doesn't figure out how amazing a product it is and revive it: youtube.com/watch?v=tSUMBeaaiOo

Improve this answer
0

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .