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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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.