Building a new system and considering Optane memory

[RKora]

Greetings,

I am building a new system and I am considering including Optane memory.

Does Intel Optane memory work with a SSD boot drive and regular data drives?

Does Intel Optane memory work with a SSD boot drive and mirrored regular data drives in a raid 0+1 configuration?

I intend to build the system with a Asus Prime Z270-K motherboard and a Intel BX80677I57600 7th Gen Core Desktop Processor with 16GB of DDR4 RAM.

I am considering reusing a 180GB Intel SSD with a 2TB Seagate platter HDD or possibly multiple 2TB Seagate platter HDDS in a raid 0+1 configuration. I will also have 2ea SATA DVD RW drives in the system. It will be a new build with Windows 10 64bit (probably professional not home). I will then migrate my data from my current Windows 7 pro system I have.

Thanks for your cooperation and assistance.

Happy Thanksgiving to all and may God bless you and your families.

[idata]

Hi LargeTarget,

Thanks for showing the interest in our Intel® Optane™ Memory.We would like to inform you that the Optane™ only works with SATA Boot drives, it does not support RAID configurations. It seems that you meet the hardware requirements for Optane™(motherboard and processor). For more information please check the following articles: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000024018/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html Frequently Asked Questions for Intel® Optane™ Memory -intel.com If you have further questions then feel free to contact us again. Regards, Junior M.

[RKora]

Junior M,

Would it work with a SSD boot drive and an SSD data drive?

Is it Intel specific or would it work with a WD blue label SSD?

Would it work with an Intel SSD boot drive and a WD blue label SSD data drive?

Thanks for the quick answer to my previous question and I look forward to your answer of these questions.

V/R

LargeTarget

[RKora]

Hi,

I moved this to Optane memory because I posted it to the wrong place (SSD's) originally.

Thanks for your help.

V/R

LargeTarget

[idata]

Hi LargeTarget,

Thanks for the reply. In order to answer your questions, you can accelerate the SATA Boot drive and have an SSD or an HDD as a storage device, if they are not set up as a RAID. You can use any branded drive as a SATA Boot Drive because Optane™ works with any drive Manufacturer. If the SSD is SATA it will work with the configuration mentioned before but if the SSD is NVMe* the performance benefit is none. Please let us know if there is something else we can assist you with. Regards, Junior M.

[idata]

Hi LargeTarget,

We would like to know if you read our previous post. If you have any other questions, we'll be waiting for your response.

Regards, Junior M.

[JHagl1]

As Intel has already replied for an NVMe SSD there's no purpose (and maybe no way to even do it.)

For a SATA SSD maybe it in some metrics could make it perform more similar to an NVMe SSD, on the other hand I've seen one case where Optane + SSHD actually become slower than just the SSHD.

The major advantage is where when it's used as a cache for a HDD but the possibility to do so has already been available before using SSD as cache for the HDD with a similar boost (though SATA SSDs aren't as fast as Optane on all metrics, especially latency.) But you are not using your system like that as is. You could install Windows on the HDD and use Optane as cache for that and then use the SSD as a secondary drive and put whatever on it but that's not necessarily what you want to do. Look at it as "roll your own SSHD"-solution but only for the boot-drive.

I find it weird that not more people used SSD caching because where it was tested it was suggested it worked fine yet the Internet "knowledge" says to not bother with either of that or SSHDs and to just use an SSD as boot drive and an HDD as it is. And for sure the full flash memory based drive will be faster than the drive which will depend on spinning platter speeds now and then but the question should rather had been whatever the HDD with SSD cache was "acceptable" / "good enough" and whatever the support to get that boost of performance onto the whole storage area of a HDD was a worthwhile trade-off. If I could I would had been interested in turning my whole 250 GB SSD as cache for the HDD to get as much boost as possible there =P

[RKora]

Aliquis - funny you should mention using SSDs as a cache. My Son-In-Law runs a home virtualized lab (mainly LINUX) with some older Compaq DL360s and DL380s. He uses a smaller (32GB I think) SSD as a cache in his storage server. He says it works great. NOTE, he is younger and needs less sleep than I do (too much work for me - I run my PLEX media server/file server on a Dell T20 with Windows 10 - it was windows 7 but I did the free upgrade recently)...

Merry Christmas.

V/R

Large Target (Steve)

PS - SKOL Vikings :->

[RKora]

Junior M,

You fully and completely answered my questions thanks for the quick and great help.

Based on your answers, further research and falling prices I have decided to go with a M.2 NVMe 256GB (or so) boot drive (WD Black or Samsung 960 EVO) with 2ea 500GB (or so) standard SSDs (Samsung 850 EVO or Crucial MX300) for data drives. I may add OPTANE memory later for the data drives, but I expect an order of magnitude performance boost over my current PC without OPTANE memory (ASUS P5N-T Deluxe/Core 2 Duo - about 10 years old and literally died yesterday, RIP). So I expect I will be satisfied with the increase for a while (like when I went from platter HDDs to SSDs as boot drives for every PC in the family).

Aliquis - funny you should mention using SSDs as a cache. My Son-In-Law runs a home virtualized lab (mainly LINUX) with some older Compaq DL360s and DL380s. He uses a smaller (32GB I think) SSD as a cache in his storage server. He says it works great. NOTE, he is younger and needs less sleep than I do (too much work for me - I run my PLEX media server/file server on a Dell T20 with Windows 10 - it was windows 7 but I did the free upgrade recently)...

Thanks for everyone's help. May God bless you and your families with a Merry Christmas plus a safe and Happy New Years.

V/R

LargeTarget

PS - SKOL Vikings :->

[idata]

Hi LargeTarget,

We are glad to hear that we already answered your concern. If you have further questions then feel free to contact us again. Regards, Junior M.