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 - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The 118GB Optane SSD 800P is the only cache module large enough to handle the entirety of the Heavy test, with a data rate that is comparable to running the test on the SSD as a standalone drive. The smaller Optane Memory drives do offer significant performance increases over the hard drive, but not enough to bring the average data rate up to the level of a good SATA SSD.
The 64GB Optane Memory M10 offers similar latency to the 118GB Optane SSD 800P when both are treated as standalone drives. In a caching setup the cache misses have a big impact on average latency and a bigger impact on 99th percentile latency, though even the 32GB cache still outperforms the bare hard drive on both metrics.
The average read latency scores show a huge disparity between standalone Optane SSDs and the hard drive. The 118GB cache performs almost as well as the standalone Optane drives while the 64GB cache averages a bit worse than the Crucial MX500 SATA SSD and the 32GB cache averages about half the latency of the bare hard drive.
On the write side, the Optane M.2 modules don't perform anywhere near as well as the Optane SSD 900P, and the 32GB module has worse average write latency than the Crucial MX500. In caching configurations, the 118GB Optane SSD 800P has about twice the average write latency of the 900P while the smaller cache configurations are worse off than the SATA SSD.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores rank about the same as the average latencies, but the impact of an undersized cache is much larger here. With 99th percentile read and write latencies in the tens of milliseconds, the 32GB and 64GB caches won't save you from noticeable stuttering.
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Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Yes, but since my AMD system is a Threadripper, it won't actually represent any cost savings compared to the systems tested in this review.evernessince - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
AdoredTV already did a video showing the performance improvements from StoreMi.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3-SqJHYzC0
AMD's solution works in the same way, in that as you run programs it stores data to the cache drive. The big difference is AMD's solution let's you use any SSD as a cache drive. This means it can be any size and it doesn't require an addition purpose. This is especially important, give the huge price tag of the larger optane drives.
Speed wise though, assuming the Intel SSD is actually big enough to cache all your data, they are about equal. Of course, the AMD solution would be slower if you used a really low end SSD as your cache drive. It could also be much faster if you used a really good SSD though. The Intel optane drive has performance numbers similar to a 960 evo. The problem for Intel though are the small sizes and large prices. $200 for only 118GB of space is not a good solution. You could get double that space with a brand new 250GB 960 evo and it costs half as much. That's assuming you want to keep that drive for caching only, you could simply use your current SSD with the AMD solution and save $200+ altogether.
I simply don't see a universe where Optane makes sense.
CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You realize you can use Optane like any other SSD right? You can even use it with StorageMI.MDD1963 - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
There will be no tiny Optane things inserted into/wasting an M.2 NVME slot making it SEEM like I have a 960/970; there will be a 960/970. :)Valantar - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Any chance you could test one of these drives with AMD's new caching solution? AFAIK the drives show up as regular NVME devices, so it should work in theory. Would be really interesting to see these solutions compared, and if Ryzen or Threadripper can make proper use of Optane caching through third-party software.Billy Tallis - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
I'll be setting up a Threadripper system this week to test both caching and NVMe RAID.Lolimaster - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
My only use for an optane drive would be for swap file, firefox/chrome cache/install/profiles and GTA5.But a 500GB 860EVO cost $169 with 300TB of endurance vs 365TB on optane, with the 860 offering 4x the storage... dunno.
Their "low end" 118GB 800p needs to improve endurance to at least 1PB level to be a proper swapfile/browser/cache tool
evernessince - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
So what's the point of this when AMD is giving away StoreMi with it's X470 boards? From what I've seen from reviews of the product, it works exceptionally well. It also doesn't require you to buy another drive and it can use much larger SSDs as a cache.CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You can definitely ignore Intel's marketing pitch about these. But you can use ANY Optane drive, including ones mentioned here like ANY OTHER SSD out there. So you can make it work with StoreMi too. You have to decide which drive benefits your workload more and how and what your budget is. Optane has inherent benefits that beats out NAND is many ways. But again, just depends on what you want. The smaller GB ones are pretty damn cheap in my opinion. So worth just trying out.Svend Tveskæg - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Reminds me of back in the days, when you could buy a weird plastic screen, that claimed it would turn your black and white television into a color-TV....