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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FunBunny2 - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
one of the distinguishing points, so to speak, of XPoint is its byte-addressable protocol. but I've found nothing about the advantages, or whether (it seems so) OS has to be (heavily?) modified to support such files. anyone know?Billy Tallis - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
The byte-addressability doesn't provide any direct advantages when the memory is put behind a block-oriented storage protocol like NVMe. But it does simplify the internal management the SSD needs to do, because modifying a chunk of data doesn't require re-writing other stuff that isn't changing. NVDIMMs will provide a more direct interface to 3D XPoint, and that's where the OS and applications need to be heavily modified.zodiacfml - Friday, May 18, 2018 - link
Quite impressive but for 32GB Optane drive, I can have a 250 GB SSD.The Optane might improve performance for fractions of a second over SSDs for applications but it won't help during program/driver installations or Windows updates which needs more speed.
I'd reconsider it for a 64 GB Optane as a boot drive for the current price of the 32GB.
RagnarAntonisen - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
You've got to feel for Intel. They spend a tonne of cash on projects like Larrabee, Itanium and Optane and the market and tech reviewers mostly respond with a shrug.And then everyone complains they're being complacent when it comes to CPU design. Mind you they clearly were - CPU performances increased at a glacial rate until AMD released a competitive product and then there was a big jump from 4 cores to 6 in mainstream CPUs with Coffee Lake. Still if the competition was so far behind you can afford to direct to R&D dollars to other areas.
Still it all seems a bit unfair - Intel get criticised when they try something new and when they don't.
And Itanium, Larrabee and Optane all looked like good ideas on paper. It was only when they had a product that it became clear that it wasn't competitive.
Adramtech - Sunday, May 20, 2018 - link
since when is a 1st or 2nd Gen product competitive? I'm sure if they don't have a path to reach competitiveness, the project will be scrapped.Keljian - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
While I don't doubt the tests are valid, I would really like to see a test with say PrimoCache - with the blocksize set to 4k. I have found in my own testing that Optane (with PrimoCache using optane as an L2 @ 4k) is very worthwhile even for my Samsung 950 pro.Keljian - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
https://hardforum.com/threads/intel-900p-optane-wo... - Here are my benchmark findings for the 850 evo and 950 pro using the 32gb optane as L2 cache. You'll notice the 4k speeds stand out.denywinarto - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
Thinking of using this with 12 tb hgst for a gamedisk drive for a ISCSI-based server, the data read is usually the same as they only game files. But occasionally new game gets added. Would it be a better option compared to raid? SSD are too expensive.Lolimaster - Monday, October 1, 2018 - link
Nice to use the 16GB as pagefile, chrome/firefox profile/cacheLolimaster - Tuesday, October 2, 2018 - link
It's better to use them as extra ram/pagefile or scratch disk.