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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philehidiot - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
"Fud" is also an excellent Scottish swear word. I particularly enjoy using it due to it's brutal bluntness.ianmills - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Intel was the one who claimed a coffee lake motherboard was needed for optane. Most likely the slow speed has to do with the spectre/meltdown fix that greatly slows down disk operations done in different user spaces on Intel chipsbananaforscale - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Oh but it *is* proprietary, you just don't know what the word means. Look it up. It *doesn*t* imply anything about compatibility.nevcairiel - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
All hardware really is, so the only argument anyone could reasonably make would be about the interface/compatibility when using that word.evernessince - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
No reason to buy with an AMD motherboard though, as AMD is handing out StoreMI for free with X470 boards. StoreMI is superior as well.Klimax - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Interesting lack of evidence...Dr. Swag - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Still don't see why a user should choose a 64gb optane drive over, say, a 500gb mx500, which you could use 64gb for caching using RST. The performance difference between optane and an mx500 won't be noticeable when doing normal stuff like booting up and launch apps.WithoutWeakness - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
There are a lot of folks who use their computers for more than just running Chrome and a few games. Many people with professional workflows have storage drives in the 4-8+ TB range but only need to work with ~50-100GB of data at a time. In these scenarios the active data will be automatically cached on the Optane drive and their workflows can be greatly accelerated without the need to copy it to a separate SSD scratch drive before working on it. If you have so little data that you can just run off of a 500GB SATA SSD then obviously just buy the MX500.iwod - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Surely the same can be done for SSD Boot Drive, this is more of a software advantage then a hardware advantage.CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You can use Optane drives like any SSD though. Even if these are being marketed as a caching only thing, you can still use it however you like. Want to pay less to try out software caching? Get the cheaper one then and try it out.