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1343 Discussions

Intel Optane Memory is unable to see all secondary drives

Wibble
New Contributor I
3,659 Views

I have just installed the Intel Optane Memory module to accelerate a secondary application drive. It is installed properly, system is booting, and the driver and software is installed and recognizes the Intel Optane Memory module.

 

When I try to select a drive to accelerate, though, it only is able to see one of my installed SATA drives and not the other two. All drives are Western Digital.

 

The drive it can see is: WD4003FZEX-00Z4SA0

 

The drives it can't see are:

 

WDC WD4005FZBX-00K5WB0 

WDC WD6003FZBX-00K5WB0 (the one i want to accelerate)

 

What would be the reason for this?

 

You can see what I mean in the attached image.

 

intel-optane.jpg

 

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1 Solution
Wibble
New Contributor I
2,412 Views

Getting better and also weirder :)

 

So I switched the ports around for my sata drives and this time the software recognized it!

 

optane2.jpg

 

 

I have the 20mb unallocated space at the end of my system drive

 

disk-management.jpg

 

Yet, when when I check statistics, it shows just this message.

 

optane-stats.jpg

 

 

I search around and learned that a scheduled task needs to run to update the stats, but my Intel folder in the schedule tasks is empty:

 

task-scheduler.jpg

 

 

Furthermore, when I check under services, I see Intel(R) Optane Memory Watcher Service running, but the Intel(R) Optane(TM) Memory Service is not.

 

services.jpg

 

 

Any thoughts?

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20 Replies
DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

Thank you for posting in the Intel® communities.

 

It may be possible that the reason of the issue is that your other drives are not meeting the requirements for secondary drive acceleration.

 

We can check this by taking a look at your system/drives information.

 

Having said this, please download the Intel® System Support Utility (SSU) from the following site and run the full report. This report will include all details of your system. Please export the data in a text file and share it in your response: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/download/25293/Intel-System-Support-Utility-for-Windows-

 

Additionally, please open Disk Management and take a screenshot of the window to check the drives’ partitions. To open Disk Management press the Windows* key + x, and then select the Disk Management option from the menu that will appear.

 

Finally, please run the following commands in the Command Prompt to take another screenshot:

 

  1. Open the Command Prompt as Administrator.
  2. Run the command diskpart.
  3. Run the command list disk. Please take a screenshot of this output.

 

I will be waiting for your response.

 

Have a nice day.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

I would like to know if you have any updates.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

If you have any updates, feel free to share them here.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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Wibble
New Contributor I
2,378 Views

Sorry. Still have a problem. Here is the requested info.

 

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Wibble
New Contributor I
2,378 Views

Here is the diskpart.

 

Is there a way to share the SSU report privately?

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

Thank you for the information.

 

You can send me the SSU report via private message. Just hover over my username and you will see the option to send the private message.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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Wibble
New Contributor I
2,378 Views

Sent. Thanks

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

I received your message.

 

I can see that the drives that are not seen are the Disk 0 and Disk 1. I cannot see anything wrong with these drives, but in the past there have been similar reports where a particular secondary drive cannot be accelerated because it doesn’t appear in the application.

 

Those issues are usually fixed by formatting the secondary drive and re-initializing it again. For some reason, there is metadata in the drive that prevents it from being recognize properly.

 

Having said this, I recommend you to perform a low-level format on each drive. Please check the following article that includes some options of third party tools that can help you with the low-level format process: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000006198/memory-and-storage.html

 

Once the drive s formatted, you have to initialize it using GPT partition style. Then create one single volume just as they are now. This process is just to make sure any metadata in the drive that is causing the issue is deleted.

 

Additionally, I also noticed that you are missing the unallocated reserve space necessary for the module to work properly. This space should be reserved in the primary drive and it should look like in the picture below:

 

Partitions.JPG

 

So make sure to also reserve this unallocated space of at least 5MB at the end of your primary drive. It may be possible that you can still enable the module without creating this space, but it might be possible that you get another error message later on because such space is missing.

 

Let me know if the drives are recognized after performing the low-level format.

 

Have a nice day.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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Wibble
New Contributor I
2,378 Views

Thanks Diego. To be clear, this unallocated space needs to be on the primary drive and not the drive that is being accelerated? Is it a problem if that primary drive is a NVMe SSD?

 

Is it possible this problem is caused by the unallocated space or is that something completely different?

 

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

Yes, the unallocated space should be in the primary drive and it is fine if the primary drive is an NVMe* drive. The Intel® Optane™ Memory can only accelerate SATA drives, but when attempting to accelerate a secondary drive, the primary drive can be an NVMe* drive, but the secondary one must be a SATA drive.

 

I don’t think the problem is caused by the missing unallocated space, otherwise you would not have been even able to select any drive from the application. This means that the issue is related to the drives themselves. However, it’s still recommended that you leave at least 5MB of unallocated space at the end of the primary drive to avoid any possible issues in the future.

 

From the Intel® Optane™ setup side, everything is fine. We can be sure of this because you can select at least one secondary drive from the application to enable and pair the module with. If there would be any issue you would not have been able to install the application in first place, or none of the drives would’ve shown in the application to be selected.

 

It’s most likely that the root cause of the issue is the metadata in the drives that is preventing them to be recognized, so please perform the low-level format on them and let me know the results.

 

If you have any other doubts, feel free to ask.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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Wibble
New Contributor I
2,378 Views

Hi Diego,

 

I low level formatted the drive I want to use as secondary drive and it still is not recognized by your software. I also did a full format in WIndows and it still could not detect it.

 

I initialized it as a GPT drive and created a single simple volume.

 

I still have not resized the primary drive to add the reserved space as I want to make sure the secondary drive can be seen before I start messing around with my system drive.

 

Any other ideas? We know Optane is working as it's detected by the system and the software is seeing another secondary drive in the system. It just cannot detect these newer Western Digital drives, which appear to be the same model but different capacities.

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

Thank you for the updates.

 

This is really weird, and the only explanation I can think of is that maybe this specific HDD model has compatibility issues with the application. I’m thinking this because everything else is working fine. As you mentioned, the Intel® Optane™ Memory can be setup correctly in your system, and in fact, the application shows another drive that you can pair the module with, so this points to an issue with the drive itself or to the specific drive’s model.

 

The suggestion I can give you is to try to add the unallocated reserved space as explained above just to isolate possible root causes. You can reserve this space during the Windows* OS installation process. This space should be at least 5MB and should be reserved only in the primary drive (although there are users that create the unallocated space at the end of the secondary drives as well).

 

I have only seen one similar issue like yours, where a secondary drive couldn’t be recognized and it turned out that the HDD was damaged somehow. If I’m not mistaken, the user reported that by using a third party tool, the drive was scanned and some errors were discovered with the drive.

 

I don't think this is your issue since you mentioned these HDDs are new, but you can try to scan the HDDs with some third party tool to see if there are any errors with them that you are not aware of. If that doesn’t work even though the reserved unallocated space is already in place, then I would say there is some kind of compatibility issues with this specific model, which is really uncommon.

 

Alternatively, you can try to use your other drive, the one the application can see to pair the module with, or maybe trying to change the ports where the drives are connected to just to make sure the issue is not related to how the drives are connected to the motherboard.

 

These are all ideas I have for you.

 

Have a nice day.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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Wibble
New Contributor I
2,378 Views

Thanks. Doubt its a hardware issue with the drives as they both brand new and both not being detected. If it was one, I could see that, but both would be quite the coincidence :)

 

I plan on doing what you mentioned. Switching the port that the current detected drive uses with the one I want to use. It could be a sata channel sharing issue.

 

As for the 5 mb reserve, I really don't want to have to reinstall the OS. Could I not shrink the primary partition to get the extra space?

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

Yes, you can also shrink the primary partition to create the unallocated space in the drive. Please check the following article where this process is explained (among other suggestions for different configuration issues): https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000024113/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html. Just look for the error codes “0xA001004B,0xA001004C, 0xA001004E” to see the explanation of the shrink process.

 

I’ll be waiting for your results.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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Wibble
New Contributor I
2,413 Views

Getting better and also weirder :)

 

So I switched the ports around for my sata drives and this time the software recognized it!

 

optane2.jpg

 

 

I have the 20mb unallocated space at the end of my system drive

 

disk-management.jpg

 

Yet, when when I check statistics, it shows just this message.

 

optane-stats.jpg

 

 

I search around and learned that a scheduled task needs to run to update the stats, but my Intel folder in the schedule tasks is empty:

 

task-scheduler.jpg

 

 

Furthermore, when I check under services, I see Intel(R) Optane Memory Watcher Service running, but the Intel(R) Optane(TM) Memory Service is not.

 

services.jpg

 

 

Any thoughts?

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Wibble
New Contributor I
2,378 Views

Also is the unallocated space used as a temp partition for the cache? If so, will it decrease the longevity of the SSD due to its constant writes?

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

Thank you for sharing the results.

 

I’m glad to know the issue was caused by the drives’ connections, although the low-level format and the unallocated reserved space are also recommended when enabling the Intel® Optane™ Memory with any HDD.

 

Anyhow, it’s up and running now and that's great! 😃

 

Regarding to the question about the statistics, they appear only once the first scheduled task migration is complete, however this feature is only available when the drive accelerated is the primary one. You are currently accelerating a secondary drive, so you won’t see any data on the Statistics tab.

 

I hope this clarifies your concern around this topic.

 

Regarding to your last question, the unallocated space is indeed for the Intel® Optane™ Memory to store configuration data. This space won’t decrease the SSD longevity as it just contains configuration data. The “cache” functionality is performed in the Intel® Optane™ Memory itself, so there won’t be constants writes to the SSD.

 

I hope this information has clarified all your doubts.

 

If there is anything else I can help you with, feel free to ask.

 

Have a nice day.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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Wibble
New Contributor I
2,378 Views

Thanks Diego. So there is no way to access statistical information to see how well the secondary drive acceleration is working?

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,378 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

Yes, that’s correct. This information is only available when the primary drive is the one being accelerated.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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DiegoV_Intel
Moderator
2,198 Views

Hi Wibble,

 

Just wondering if there is anything else I can help you with.

 

Regards,

Diego V.

Intel Customer Support Technician

Under Contract to Intel Corporation

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