The Intel Optane Memory M10 (64GB) Review: Optane Caching Refreshed
by Billy Tallis on May 15, 2018 10:45 AM EST- Posted in
- SSDs
- Storage
- Intel
- PCIe SSD
- SSD Caching
- M.2
- NVMe
- Optane
- Optane Memory
AnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The data rates on the Light test show clear signs of a cold cache on the first run, with substantially improved performance for the second and third runs. The 32GB cache module is still a bit small for this test and it can only bring the data rates up to about the level of a SATA SSD, but the 64GB and 118GB modules allow for performance that almost matches low-end NVMe SSDs like the MyDigitalSSD SBX (and without the capacity limitations or steep performance drop when full).
With a warmed-up cache, the Optane Memory M10 64GB and the larger Optane SSD 800P offer better average and 99th percentile latency than SATA SSDs. The 118GB cache beats the SATA drives even with a cold cache. The 32GB Optane Memory is well behind the SATA SSD even with a warm cache, especially for 99th percentile latency. But even so, all of these cache configurations easily beat running on just a hard drive.
The effects of a cold vs. warm cache show up quite clearly on the average read latency chart, but naturally have minimal effect on the average write latencies. It is clear that the 32GB Optane Memory's overall latency fell behind that of the SATA SSD almost entirely because of poor write performance: with a warm cache, the read latency of the 32GB module is slower than that of its larger siblings but is still an improvement over the SATA SSD.
The 99th percentile read latency scores emphasize the impact of a cold cache more than the average latency, especially for the 64GB cache module. Even the 118GB cache lags behind the SATA SSD on the first run. The 99th percentile write latencies are larger in absolute terms than the average write latencies, but the relative differences are almost all the same except that the hard drive stands out even more.
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Samus - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
For $160-$170 (<$150 on sale, basically the price of 64GB of Optane) you can get a the WD Black 512GB M2 NVME PCIe SSD that does 2000MB+/sec rear for all 512GB.Why the hell is Optane so expensive. 5-7x the price of traditional NAND?
Arnulf - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Because it is crap which nobody would buy if it was priced close to SSDs of similar performance and capacity:"It costs 5-7 times more than SSDs, must be something magical about it, let's buy one honey!"
Much like $1000 mobile phones, bait for the stupid.
CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Because it uses phase change instead of NAND and it's new tech. They're trying to recoup R&D cost.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
"hey're trying to recoup R&D cost. "PCM is decades old tech. look it up. throwing good money after bad, just like pharma.
deil - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
I have 8 TB drive AND I would enjoy some speedup as current usual run takes ~~5h full run. With that 32 GB joke drive even if it would not double the speed, Speedup of 20% time is a lot in my case. AND I don't get to redesign anything to use another drive or have to build 8 TB ssd raid.Spunjji - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
On what basis do you think you'll achieve any speed-up, though?tipoo - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Yeah, I can't see why 5x the NAND for the cost wouldn't almost always be preferable for budget systems.I can only see this making sense for datacenter use.
0ldman79 - Thursday, May 17, 2018 - link
Primocache does the same thing.I've got an 80gig in my desktop, a 60 in an Asus laptop that has two 2.5 bays and a 16gig M.2 in my Inspiron 7559.
I don't use RAM as a buffer, just the SSD. Works great, unless you have an unstable system. Any time you lose power or don't shut down cleanly the cache resets. With the cache, however, my main box boots in about 20-30 seconds, all apps loaded, where as just running the mechanical drive a reboot is nearly a 4 minute affair.
lefty2 - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Ironically, these drives work better with AMD motherboards than Intel:https://fudzilla.com/news/pc-hardware/46145-amd-st...
CajunArson - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Where does Idiot-Zilla prove that Optane works "better" with AMD motherboards than Intel?But for a site that starts with "Fud" I will give them credit for dispelling the completely wrong "FUD" that is actually spread by AMD fanboys that Optane is a proprietary technology that only works with Intel products. Never has been proprietary.