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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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....