Optane Latency and Why I've Been Obsessed with Intel's Fire Sale
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- Опубліковано 27 вер 2024
- So it may not be for everybody, but here are Wendell's reasons for becoming so obsessed with Intel's Optane!
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this is the first video where I thought to myself Wendel looks a lot thinner. good on him for making heather choices its definitely making a difference and he looks healthier.
Same.
In six months the dude is going to be shooting for deadlift personal bests. Love to see it.
you too can take up the "I got bit by a Tic" weight loss challenge - near death experience _may not_ be included
ngl always thought wendell had a good looking face
We're all gonna make it brah
I really wish Intel hadn't killed these off, and I also wish Micron hadn't abandoned their efforts at a competitor
Intel probably killed them by having some models or use cases restricted to Intel CPUs. That doesn't make it attractive for the future.
@@pizzablender Like Wendel says, the _drivers_ are Intel only, but the hardware is not - they probably killed it off because it performed better on AMD platforms .. :)
@@paulwratt Until now i didnt know it, as an AMD user Optane was a No-No for me since it only "works" at Intel, i never dive deeper since is Intel way of doing things like the new OneAPI thing which you cant use the profiler if you dont use an Intel CPU because Intel VTune only runs on Intel CPUs so i didnt expect otherwise
Yep... It's definitely pretty clear now that...
Modern Windows is slow as fuck. LMAO
My heavyweight MX Linux install with KDE boots in at least HALF the time of non-Optaned Windows 11, and all off a shitty Kingston SSD too. My Windows 8.1 install is different as it's installed to a PCIe 3.0 NVMe Samsung drive admittedly, but even so, it boots in 10 fucking seconds. No Optane needed. Hell, maybe not even 10 seconds. I swear, I'm never using Windows 11. Microsoft nowadays is just a ghost of the giant they once were, and Linux absolutely kicks its ass up and down the road nowadays.
@@juanalcan3964 If you use Optane as a drive then it works on any system. However the NVMe sticks which are part Optane and part Flash are really only good on compatible Intel systems. I made the mistake of buying one for my RYZEN TrueNAS Core server and could not figure out how to use it so I returned it. Straight Optane is OK but the little 16GB ones do nothing for TrueNAS, may even slow it down. Spend your money on RAM.
I remember reading a tech article about Optane when it was first unveiled and thinking that it was the future for storage technology, and promising enough to eventually replace traditional NAND SSDs completely, after it matured. It was, and still is, very impressive, which makes it all the more sad, and a bit tragic, that Intel is just giving up on it. I can only hope that they're giving up on it, because they've got a secret successor in the works, that they've yet to unveil. But, that's probably just wishful thinking.
Well, it depends. If nand starts to stagnate, or corporate buyers need more resilient ssd storage, we might see Intel either evolve the tech or license it to someone who will. Intel has been feeling the heat from AMD, and I think they're betting on encoding and machine learning (i.e. their gpus) as being a more future proofed business opportunity than continuing their storage solutions. I'm guessing enterprise is just dandy with products like those from kioxia, and work station users are either doing a lot of linear work (think video editing), or are doing most of their work in such a way that optane will only help them in testing, not production, like Wendel mentioned. Sadly, technology is always about what's the most marketable and profitable, not what's best.
well, that's true, technically. it is the future.
but complications like not being able to drive cost down as much means that Consumers just won't Buy it. average joe doesn't care if something is better.
remember that thing Henry Ford supposedly said.... "if i asked the People what they wanted, they would have said faster Horses". it's rough trying to get average joe to want specific things that are better. they'll want better, but not REALLY know what better means.
@@taiiat0 - Is there not a market for using this as a database drive, though? There are plenty of tasks where high random I/O performance is critical, especially in the commercial sector.
@@arthurwintersight7868
plenty of use for it in Server/Datacenter, since when it was in Production it tended to cost ~6x more than traditional NAND but have ~10x the lifespan, so a net gain for them.
commerial use SSD's already do hit excellent random performance, but traditional NAND does it via extreme overprovisioning, versus Optane just being good at it inherently.
obviously despite being so great that wasn't enough on its own considering we're in this scenario now of it being sunset while traditional NAND is still in Production.
oh well
@@taiiat0 Would Intel Optane SSD's benefit me for setting up a Plex or Jellyfin server full of 4K Blu-ray rips??
I want VERY snappy performance.
It's really sad Intel never got Optane to a production level, were they could really do something to push down the pricing for consumers...
I mean the 480GB 905P was quiet "affordable" compared to other Optane models or other High-End consumer SSD's in the past,
but lets be real, most consumers just don't care about latency that much, even though they probably should.
The combination of PCIe 4.0 and multible TB of storage space for a few hundred bucks in M.2 format, is just too tempting for most customers
and I can almost not blame them...
Drive endurance ratings though are another plus point. They are usually higher by a factor of 5-10 on an Optane drive at minimum!
Or the fact that Optane doesn't need "optimization" or defrag...
But basically all Optane Models you can get your hands on, are close to either unaffordable or just overpriced, bad deals... At least in the EU.
I mean I saw a 1.5TB 905P for almost 3000€ so... So unlike the deal at Newegg (which I cant use...) they are usually still above msrp.
Afterall, I wouldnt mind a few smaller 905P or P4800X/P4801X for my server, NAS or gaming rig,
buuut... a 480GB 905P is at around 700€+ and a 375GB P4800X is above 1100€.
So... lets be real, for that I could buy a 3.2TB Kioxia CM6-V U.3 Drive (3DWPD).
Reliability figures in terms of endurance for Optane are usually 30-100 better than TLC NAND SSDs. They are better even than SLC.
I would not be focusing on biggest models. There are crazy expensive. Get what has best $/TB in reasonable price.
905P is still expensive.
900P 280GB, is a decent choice.
Considering pricing, using Optane where it matter, is the best option. For things like caches, write ahead logs, journals, etc. And for things like that you do not need more than dozen GBs usually. If you care about reliability and latency for writes then Optane is worth it. Otherwise just use more RAM.
@@movax20h Can be even higher than that.
A DC P480?X has between 30 and 60DWPD. A DCP580?X is already up to 100DWPD, which is just insane, and makes Intels decision even harder to understand.
Even a DCP1600X has 6DWPD.
Just for comparison, the average consumer SSD has ~0.8-1.3DWPD and falling!
A 2TB Samsung 990Pro has ~0.33DWPD! If I did the math correctly, that would correspond to ~57 hours lifetime at 6GB/s.
Meaning even if Intel would have reduced the durability of the 905P by a factor of 3, they would be still 10 times higher (~3DWPD) in comparison
to Samsung. And their highest tier barely makes 10DWPD... Just let that sink in. It kind of relativises intels Optane pricing.
They basically "just" need to broaden the durability level and thus probably the manufacturing cost, and they would be killing the Market.
Afterall, there is seemingly no alternative in the near future to replace NAND-flash, now that Optane is basically gone.
@@The_ViciousOne Question:
Let's say I want to buy an EVGA Intel Motherboard to build a gaming rig and I want the absolute fastest performance with Windows when it comes to opening apps, etc.
If price doesn't matter, what's the "bleeding edge" recommended setup I should go with? Do I use an Intel Optane SSD as my OS drive or a Western Digital SN850X as my OS drive and an Optane SSD as a second drive?
Which Optane drive has the best performance?
Price doesn't matter to me.
@@PSYCHOV3N0M Well, "bleeding edge" is kind of relative. Since PCIe5 drives are slowly entering the market, but I can't really say if those make much of a difference in daily use anyway. As for Optane SSD's if you, for whatever reason actually wanted to go that rout: Intel DC P5800X Models. But besides price, and availability, you'd still need to find an appropriate HQ cable or adapter. That's another problem in on itself. 🤔
95% of customers will never come close to using the endurance of a bottom barrel QLC nand drive.
So I picked up a P1600X 110 Gb stick based on your videos about the fire sale and I've been playing around with it with mixed results and so far I think I've come up with a pretty strong combo for my computer.
For starters I pretty much just partitioned the single p1600x into two separate drives.
One drive is being used with Primocache as an l2 read cache with 4mb of l1 write cache.
On the 2nd partition I have moved my windows swap file and my firefox cache folder to. I also moved a game that seems to have just endless small files to read in MTG Arena on that partition and I swear this old E5-2690 V4 is singing like it has never sung before.
If I had some spare cash (lol) I'd buy another stick so I wouldn't have to partition the drive and just dedicate separate sticks to the two tasks. I swear, these days I've been having dreams of optane, lol. The real dream is to get one of those 950 gb or 1.5 tb ones. =d
Optane is a gift from god, the only issue with it was pricing. Now that Intel is winding it down, I'll be picking up a few more drives.
you look more healthy and energized wendel ! keep up the good work, and great video !
One big thing is missing; asset streaming. Open world games, such as Fallout 4, Skyrim, Conan Exiles, The Sims 3, WoW, etc., do a lot of asset streaming from multiple archives continuously. Unloading a cell as you get near the border, loading a bunch of players' assets, loading a new player's base, that sort of thing. Wonder how the much lower latency would affect stutters and frametimes in those games.
@@LuggageStardate Nope, that would overload RAM super fast. There's a reason games use asset streaming. For example, Fallout 4 has something like >40GB of texture data easily, without the HD DLC. Skyrim uses multiple GBs just for face textures, and was designed around fitting the entire game into 512MB of RAM.
IOPS might help but there shouldn't be much benefit from just basic latency. Ideally asset streamed games should be well optimised as well so the loading is at least partially parallel which would suit SSDs better than queue depth 1 workloads, although who even knows with Bethesda games lol
faster Devices will always help a bit but Streaming Assets in a game should generally be large amounts of Data mostly Sequentially.
like was said, the Software needs its Data to be stored kind've as a mess for it to make a big impact. to make games faster on cheaper Hardware, games are already usually optimizing their Data so that it can be loaded pretty much Sequentially to maximize the Hardware the Customer has.
now..... some games that i could perhaps see a distinct advantage possible, would be say.... Minecraft, or other games like it? where nonpredictable Data is stored in lots of pieces, and also kind've inefficiently. Minecraft having Thousands and Thousands of tiny Files for its World data (instead of something more logical like one File with an internal structure), that's a case where faster Devices could provide use.
however you also are then up against NTFS, you can only open and close so many Files in a span of time. plus Windows Defender will freak out if you try to perform too many open/close actions on Files a Second (this is something you can solve but 99% of users use the default everything ofc, so).
I've seen it going through Forza Horizon 5.
At first I was playing it on my old rig, i5-3570K GTX970 with the game on a 7200RPM HDD. Which was unplayable at speeds above 200kph, even going down "the highway", which is linear and very predictable for the game, the HDD just couldn't spin up the assets fast enough.
Moving the game to SATA SSD made it playable at a stable 30 FPS. Again far from ideal, but stable and playable.
Then I upgraded to an i5-11400, built a custom loop, because the GPU apocalypse at the time made buying a 30 series impossible. This killed the CPU bottle neck and gave me 60 FPS stable, capped by vsync.
Recently I bought a cheapo 20 euro Gen 3 NVME, and now I'm still at 60FPS, but somehow my GPU has gone down from 95% load to 80%.
The RAM upgrade was much less noticeable. Going from 24GB DDR3-1600 (mismatched RAM 2x8 + 2x4) to 32GB DDR4-3600 (2x16 matched pair) makes a difference, but not so much in games. There just aren't that many games out there which will happily eat up even 8GB of RAM.
I ran my current setup for a while with a single 16GB dimm and the difference between single and dual channel is very much noticeable, the difference between 16 and 32GB, not really in games.
@@fermitupoupon1754 GPU usage would go *up* or remained unchanged if you had removed a storage bottleneck - if the SSD was able to feed the GPU faster then the GPU would have more work to do. Vsync messes with that a bit but the SSD feeding more data to the GPU won't make the GPU's job easier. Instead, what's much more likely is either a driver update to better optimise your GPU in Forza, or a Forza update to better optimise it on older GPUs.
The boot time test is flawed,
I'm pretty sure that the optane/xpoint drive was the bootloader drive, and that's why it was much quicker, since it didn't need to wait for the UEFI to load and some of the files for booting windows were already in ram and all it had to load was the login screen, unlike the nand ssd which had to reboot, and load the UEFI, then it's own bootloader, then login screen.
Soo your saying that Wendell this kind of mistakes when he literally recovered data from dead ssd by making database of 1 and 0 from the drive data dump in "You did WHAT with the dead SSD? And the data?".
That got my eye too, well spotted !
Wendell should have just replugged drives, not kept both in the system.
May be on fire sale elsewhere but I just checked in Australia and they want ~$500 for 280GB or $1000 for 480GB, meanwhile a 1/2TB samsung 990 pro is ~$240/430.
At these high-optane (octane pun) prices you could buy 64/128GB DDR5 RAM or 128/256GB DDR4 and use the excess for a RAM disk.
Yeah, same in Europe. And that's if you can even find them at all. I think this is really basically just the US (and maybe Canada). :/
@@Blacklands yeah I looked also basically only affordable one is thw 16gb, everything else is 700-900 € with some going to 6000€
Would love to have a tool and test database that could show the performance gains from latency. It's very hard to explain and show the performance gains from latency to someone.
4 32gb m2s and a pcie adapter card came out to $120.
Considering the kind of uplift you're likely to see from any other upgrade, I'd say it's worth a shot.
Is your pci card going through the chipset? Or straight to the CPU?
Windows caching is RAM really screwed me over about 10 years ago. Wrote a python script to turn a spreadsheet into 3 dimensional data using the in memory workspace and creating a temporary database. When the script was finished, there was no data janitoring needed. Well running it in an IDE had no issues but just running the .py (like a scheduled task) would consume about 12GB of memory. I had 16GB but Windows was holding about 6GB and either wouldn't give it up or couldn't fast enough. Took several weeks to figure it out.
If your home server is faster than your work server...you're probably a federal employee.
Windows memory management is so freaking fucked.
Also, taskmanager hides the amount that is really blocked and permanently locked away.
That's why I had to get another 16GB of RAM so heavily modded Minecraft wouldn't blow up the whole system. It took 23 GB while Windows showed that 2-4GB were still free.
Which was a lie.
The linux method of using excess free RAM as drive cache is so much better.
It doesn't look RAM away that isn't actually used.
He meant public cloud
@@FutureChaosTV
>while Windows showed that 2-4GB were still free
If task manager showed it, it was most likely true.
The issue is that there are 2 types of memory: requested (usually called "commit") and claimed (actually allocated).
And windows task manager focuses on the claimed memory, because it reflects the actual physical usage.
The issue is that requested memory on windows is also limited. It's not limited by the amount of physical memory you have, but still limited.
The way Linux does this is it allows a program to request however many memory it needs. If the program wants 1 terabyte of memory, Linux will say OK. Buuuut, if the program were to try to actually use this much memory, it will hard crash (if you have swap, it will happen after the swap has also been used up). Even worse, many other programs might also be affected, so you might have to reboot to fix your system.
The way Windows does this is it absolutely guarantees that the requested memory will be allocated as soon as the program needs it. No unexpected crashes.
However, this does come at a cost: you need some place to allocate this memory. If you don't have enough RAM for this, Windows will use swap (pagefile).
If your pagefile is not big enough, you can end up in a situation where you have free RAM but no program is allowed to use it.
The solution would be to increase the size of the pagefile.
>The linux method of using excess free RAM as drive cache is so much better.
Windows also uses free ram as drive cache.
And this is one of the reasons why buying more RAM is better that increasing the pagefile to allow your programs to use 100% of the RAM.
Threw the smaller drive you recommended in the last video into my work/gaming rig, into the x4/x8 electrical slot, installed primo cache, and everything works soooo much faster. I was hesitant to get more ram, as I already have 32gb, but honestly, I just might upgrade to 64gb just to add more primocache ram allocation. Chrome, explorer, and windows in general felt sooo much faster now. Seems to help with a system like mine that ends up using about 10-12gb on standby, without any obvious hogs. When you've got a ton of services running, they add up!
Without any obvious hogs? Windows is the hog of all hogs! I'm running Linux, and with all kinds of stuff loaded, browser, graphics app with huge image with some 30 layers, email program and what not it hardly ever uses above 6GB I only go over when editing video, recording multi-track audio and what not. I have 64GB and haven't even got close to using 32GB yet and I can still add 64GB more! Add to Windows being a resource hog, many other companies that make software for it just see your devices resources as all theirs to waste freely, instead of keeping their programming mean and lean in the understanding you may be using several other programs at the same time. That is frowned upon in Linux, and developers are much better at not hogging resources, to make sure multitasking is smooth with many apps running all at once without causing trouble for each other. Shit Windows 10 & 11 are much leaner than their predecessors because Microsoft used a few tricks from Linux memory management, but with as much crap as it has to load in order to keep it in constant communication with M$, and all of the crap Rube Goldberg contraptions hogging resources in protecting it's proprietary secrets, no wonder it isn't much leaner! Also it's faster boot times are a ruse! It does give you the desktop much faster, but background loading stuff goes on for a while after that, so it just appears that much faster. Try to launch something like Photoshop right away after the desktop appears and notice the significant delay due to Windows system modules needing to finish loading. When My desktop appears everything is up and ready to go right away with the only delay being the weather app retrieving info from NOAA's server, and my email program fetching email from several accounts.
Really though, I have no problem waiting a minute or two when loading the system or some piece of software, and although lightning fast now on my Ryzen 7 system, it never bothered me, and any delay is well used sipping coffee, blowing my nose or something, hardly something to get bent about. I started on a Sinclair Z81, then DOS's, then a Macintosh Lisa, then Win 3.1on a 386... try using a 28k modem over dial-up and wait 10 minutes for a freaking plain text email to send! Boot times were the least of ones worries.
@@Bob-of-Zoid Uh...cool, I guess? Linux is fun and all, but I really only use it for dev environments, where I deeply enjoy it, or in the homelab, where it's essential. Not that Linux can't game well, it can, but it's just easier on Windows for what I play. Windows does use quite a bit more resources than Linux, for obvious reasons, especially given the channel we're watching, but on a fresh install, OS is only using maybe 6GB. There's a reason people who aren't crazy like me, with hundreds of tabs open in a web browser on essentially all my devices, can get by just fine with 16GB. It's more the death by attrition of having multiple game launchers, services, programs, etc., running. Most are only a couple dozen MBs perhaps, but when you have almost 200 background processes, it makes the fairly small 100 or so windows processes blush. Anyways, really none of what you said had anything to do with optane + primocache being a neat upgrade to my computer. Also, lol, I had dial-up well into the DSL/Cable era; DOCSIS 3.0 was more or less released by the time I finally got something better than dial-up. I also didn't have, well, any internet until I was almost in high school; I maybe used it once or twice as a child on one of my father's Thinkpads. Speeding up the responsiveness of a computer you use daily isn't really an issue of patience, it's just a fun technical thing to try, especially when it can be done as cheap as this. Computer stuff is fun, why else would anyone voluntarily use Arch, if for no other reason than it's fun?
@@metaleggman18 I was not replying to everything in your comment, just pointing out that Windows is a hog. BTW: how about saving more bookmarks, organizing them and closing some browser tabs?🤔
I use Arch, and my computer for my business (not computer related), I never got into gaming really. Once everything is in place and certain tasks routine, Arch is stable as a rock and needs little intervention. I rarely open the console, or need to change system files, and can go months without for the most part.
I too am a speed freak, just because I can!😁 I wouldn't mind Optain... but it's somewhat expensive and as they often have done with other tech, intel just decided to drop it! 😕I still don't have an M.2 NVME yet🥴. I just built my Ryzen 7 system and then my car broke down, the bills for everything got insane... and I just never got around to getting some, but now going with Optain sounds like no longer a good option. I remember going from hard drives to SSD's, now that was a massive improvement, I was like 🤯Kapoof! Going to NVME's will be a speed increase over SSD's, but not nearly as much in comparison.
I think the big difference in windows boot time is that windows is almost fully loaded when you get to the "choose an operating system" prompt. If you choose the default option it goes directly to the login screen, if you choose any other option it has to fully reboot
Is that really true though, I thought the options was the UEFI BIOS prompt. And if so doesn't that mean the OS isn't even awake yet.
I’ve never had my regular nvme take anywhere near that long to boot. It is usually a 10 second process. Maybe fifteen on a bad day. Not as fast as optane but not over a minute.
for general users, optane always made most sense as a boot drive, and small cache drives. I daresay there is no system that wouldn't benefit from one of each, even now after optane was shelved.
Autumn saving the day, again.
I like all your lil' annotations lately!
I bought 2 of these, thank you for letting us know. I use these on dev machines. Optane is also quite a lot faster in 70% read/30% write scenarios, which is quite common for compilations. Also, the lifetime on these is ~30+ times bigger(P5800x ~300+ times) than on the latest generations of NAND flash - I’ve had NAND flash corruption already…
We have used optane drivers as boot disks and source code disks. Build times on large web projects 100.000+ files decreased with double digits after we made the move. Also load time within visual Studio for intelligente dropped to almost 0 after the upgrade well worth every penny we spend on them.
What's wrong with your SSD boot time? It really shouldn't take that long even for a regular SSD.
I had a 480GB 900p for a while and ended up getting a 2TB Samsung drive for the same price. Right now I have a 2TB 980 pro, 3.84TB PM983 and 7.68TB PM9A3. Thing is I also run 64GB of ram so the speed isn't always noticeable.
I've found a good (for me) use for the small (16GB/32GB) Optane nvme drives. Perhaps I've just been buying crappy USB3 thumb drives, but copying ISOs over to a standard thumb drive always seems painfully slow. I stuck one of those 32GB Optane drives into a USB3 nvme enclosures, installed Ventoy (so I could boot from multiple ISOs) and now I have a drive with pretty much any OS I want to install that's also way faster than a standard thumb drive. Yeah, it's kind of a waste for something that fast, but it's no more wasteful than letting it just sit in my junk pile.
that's a great idea, i'm definitely stealing it if i can find one of decent size to do this with.
all thumb drives are basically crap when it comes to writes, i've thrown lots of them to the trash. yeah, you didn;t really needed an optane, even the crapiest m2 nvme would have been a huge improvement, but i get it, those things are cheap and crazy durable, they are basically super low latency slc-like drives, ideal for lots of things like thumb drives, os drives for routers/firewalls, nas etc. too bad intel canceled them some time ago...
Even the crappiest NVME drive would do great in that use case. But a 512GB NVME would give you space to keep dozens of ISOs available to boot from at any time.
@@javaman2883 That's true. But as luck would have it, I don't have any 512GB NVMe drives kicking around, but I do have a 32GB Optane drive to spare. It has more than a dozen ISOs and I've yet to fill it up. Like all tips, YMMV.
Thumb drives suck. Buy a Samsung/Sandisk micro SD card and a USB card reader.
Thanks Wendell' for the video. Very timely as I have been investigating AMD RAID performance and highlighting that raw bandwidth is not always the best metric for performance!
“My home MySQL server is faster than production” - so I’m not the only one having better gear at home than at work 😊
NAND is simply good enough for almost everyone.
Curses... now I want to see if we can stuff 2230 Optane drive into the Steam Deck 😄 lets see if there are some affordable options out there (if it is at all possible of course...)
You should see how well optane does in a threeway primocache stack, by which I mean having your boot drive being an enterprise drive (Micron 9200), with your secondary and tertiary drives being consumer drives like samsung, all separated but all relying on optane as a level 2 cache, latency, what latency!?
I can load all of my games in less than 5 seconds FLAT! It's INSANE!
AND-- AND, I CAN ALSO MY OPTANE DRIVE AS A SECONDARY BOOT DRIVE FOR BSD, ALL THANKS TO THE "Volatile Storage" OPTION IN PRIMOCACHE, AMAZING!!!
THANK YOU WENDEL, YOU ARE THE REAL O(G)ptane!
5:46 so this boot test was from a system recovery prompt. Not a cold boot. This will impact load time. Also, timing how long it takes to just log in is not a cold boot test either.
In 5 years intel will be lamenting they dropped optane but kept arc going
I wanted to setup Optane but could not bring myself to justify the totally absurd price Intel though this BS was worth! This fire sale does make it worth another look!
Intel incurred more than $500 million of losses from Optane. According to Forbes, Intel subsidized Optane to gain market traction. This means the ‘absurd price’ is actually lower than what it has cost Intel to develop and make it for you.
@@kasimirdenhertog3516 So that mean becz they could not longer bear the losses, hence they decide to stop production for Optane.
@@Gattberserk correct. Intel is a business after all, and businesses are about making money. It didn't look like they were going to recoup the investment in Optane, let alone make a profit, so they cancelled it.
@@kasimirdenhertog3516 the general consumer need to be smarter than looking at just sequential read and write bigger number. Optane is the one that can bring a leap improvement in PC user experience, and they killed it by not supporting it. ooh well.
@@Gattberserktotally agree. I needed to take a deep breath before buying my Optane SSD (no fire sale back then) but have had no regrets. The low latency has transformed my computing experience. Pity everyone salivates over peak throughput, because latency is much more noticeable in day-to-day use.
Is it just me or is Wendell looking thinner?
I still have a 16GB Optane that I bought OEM (almost zero packaging) when they were on offer, I think it was about £20. I bought it to play with, rather than use, but use it I did, it's main (and obvious) problem is its capacity, I wish I had bought the 32GB version, not least because they literally doubled in price a week later....
The problem with Optane was its terrible marketing. They placed Optane products as HDD accelerators when you could just buy good quality SSD and don't bother with weird new technology. They never emphasized random access speeds. Nor they ever made a product which would had been suitable for a desktop user. Up to this day there isn't a high quality, low capacity Optane drive for home users to just put their OS in.
Absolutely abysmal marketing from the company. Only you and random user on a forum were only sources of information which would market Optane in a way which would be attractive for desktop users.
Am I right in thinking one of these drives would be amazing for file per frame based vfx workloads or would that be more of a sequnetial thing?
A good preemptive software or OS or disk driver should load the files in batches beforehand.
*SHOULD*
Damn Wendel you're looking good
Just got the 1.5TB one on newegg for $399! Gonna be playing w it soon, cant wait!
In short , Optane makes sense if you have lots and lots of small Files to load , my Boot Time into Windowsis 25 -30 sec , its not competly loaded at that point , but i can already start eg the Browser , i have no Optane . Samsung has Server SSDs , called Z-SSD with Z-NAND and claims :
Enabling faster access and response, Z-SSD provides 5 times lower latency at 20 microseconds, compared to today's leading NVMe™ SSDs*.
The latest storage server with Z-SSD is to see its latency reduced significantly, delivering a tangible performance acceleration.
The single-port, 4-lane Z-SSD features Z-NAND chips with a cell read speed 10x faster than ordinary NAND1) chips. With the maximized data bandwidth available through the PCIe® interface, 1.5GB LPDDR4 DRAM, and a high-performance controller, the Z-SSD performs 1.7 times faster2) in random read at 750K IOPS.
You can buy an 480 GB ( pure SLC) Drive for ~ 300 Dollar ( Samsung SSD 983 ZET )
So you're saying those Enterprise Samsung SSD's are superior in random performance vs Intel Optane?
I want the fastest Windows PC possible.
Price doesn't matter to me.
@@PSYCHOV3N0M Then NO , Optane has low Latency and loads randow Files faster , it only loses in loading big Files vs nomal SSDs (it dont has to be Samsung )
But Optane is basically dead , it will be phased out , Micron has discontinued 3d X Point ( Optane) in 2021
@@PSYCHOV3N0Mthe fastest would be the p5800x in raid 0... but if you want to keep it reasonable then p5800x and pcie gen 5 nvme drive as second drive. It depends on how much space you need , the apps you use and your budget. However for same cases the hdd drive is not the main thing but RAM for example for audio work having all samples in DAW loaded in RAM and whatever other programs you use open as well..
Optane is a great technology even today. The problem was it was too expensive. It's hard to say the reasons for sure for the high price but it's unlikely to be only due to monopolistic reasons. It was likely a high manufacturing cost that kept Intel from bringing prices down.
Money is not the only factor, until now i believed that it only worked with Intel CPUs and not all, only the few choosen ones with the expensive motherboard, my experiences with intel are exactly that so i wasnt surprised and since is not true Intel failed at marketing because it should say loud and clear that it works with any system, they didnt and the rest is history
@@juanalcan3964 Consumer PCs are mostly Intel anyway, I highly doubt them not publicizing that it works on AMD systems was in any way a contributor to the downfall. It was cost and the difficulty of selling something which had advantages that didn't stack up clearly on an at-a-glance data sheet on pcpartpicker or newegg or etc.
@@CyberneticArgumentCreator Optane had a clear advantage against regular SSD, it dont wear out, i care about the TBW on my SSDs because it is not "infinite" so i was willing to pay an extra but not if it only going to work on Intel systems and most probably under Windows...
And is not only me, because the product is locked to Intel i cant or wouldnt recomend to anyone else because it will backfire on my in the future, the expensive hard drive dont work on my new system type of stuff so with that move Intel lost a lot of sell. Optane was launched when Intel was the king and had 95+% of the market until Ryzen come out and surprise surprise, until 7 it had been a better choice and market proved it, now what do you do with the Optane drive? Store it until the new system of the future is Intel? My Samsung 840 still works and i know that it will do on any new or old system i put it
Optane wasn't fast enough to replace RAM, but manufacturers tried to do just that to increase their profits.
In Optane's "hayday", laptop manufactures would take a laptop model with 8GB of RAM, charge a $150 upgrade fee to give you a laptop with a 16GB Optane drive and 2GB of RAM and claim it has 16GB of memory. The $150 covered the price of the 16GB Optane drive, the reduced RAM was profit to the bottom line. The problem is that laptop with 16GB of memory did not multi-task as well as consumers expected, and did not feel snappy.
Now if they would have kept the 8GB of RAM in those laptops, the 24GB of memory would still be deceptive, but at least the performance would not be nerfed.
@@javaman2883 Not to dismiss your points I would just nail down the issue to price. While RAM is cheaper for caching at some point most applications still have to write to drives. If Optane had been cost competitive with NVMe drives it would have done far better especially in the enterprise market due to its impressive random IOPs and sustained read/writes
Those Star Citizen optane codes are gold.
Worth more than the drive to the right buyer.
I got one. Figure it's now or never. If they get cheaper, I'll just buy more.
I get why Optane Memory died, but the Optane SSDs were really good, also the old intel SSD Pro 7600p line was great.
Does anyone else remember when Windows 7 would cold boot in like 3 seconds flat? Good times.
Would love to see how optane performs with Microsoft Flight Sim
Suddenly remembering Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in Stephen King's The Stand TV miniseries with "the bring out your dead"
Im on SSD with optimized Windows & boot for 16-18sec (My old AsRock z67 Extreme did 11-13sec). If that boots for 5sec I probably can at least half that. Windows has pre-defined wait stages for drivers, services & software to load. Also can further skip & disable animations ect. 54sec boot is with old mechanical drives.
I use my PC every day, so I sleep my computer. Resumes in 2 seconds.
@@mannotwiththeplan Ye but thats not a real boot. Laptops also start quick but they also use the drive for cache, like fast startup, hybernation & sleep mode. Im talking about a real boot. You basically said I dont turn off my PC & completely missing the point.
@@n1kobg I guess what I'm saying is that if you use your computer daily, I don't see the point of booting the computer at all. Put it to sleep and it just uses a few watts of power. When I need to step away for an hour, I put it to sleep. But if you want to boot and optimize the boot, more power to you.
@@mannotwiththeplan Ye, Im guessing office work or other light tasks. Even the phones have to be restarted from time to time.
Bought a 905p this blackfriday for $250
Sweet Jesus is it fast
What did the boot time and load time differences look like? I'm very tempted lmao
I'm actually angry that this technology is being shelved, it's clearly superior to flash in every way except $/GB.
HP (now HP Enterprise) kept hyping memristors (which essentially looks exactly like what 3DXpoint is) for a decade yet we haven't seen even a single prototype of a product from them.
This whole reram, crossbar array structure for data storage just can't seem to have enough reasons to stick around and replace flash.
unrelated question: *_Hey Wendell ?!?!_* . . . . out of complete curiosity, are you a Star Citizen or Elite Dangerous kind of guy? and why? . . . just curious, there is no right or wrong answer.
regardless, Thank you for another great year of content. Happy New Year to you and yours.
I wish it was a firesale :(
Sadly $400 isn't firesale cost....
Agreed
I'm kind of curious with how hard Starfield constantly slams the drive resulting in in game stutter in many cases, even on a 990 Pro, if an Optane can help there.
I'm not going to wonder for long. I'll be decomming a 960GB 905p from my server soon, and when I do, I'm popping it in my desktop for some testing.
Update? I'd also like to know. Either way I know for certain the lower bandwidth won't matter, there's no change it does worse. Don't remember the last time (if I have at all) seen over a single gB/s of read usage from a game
I have a large poker database that takes a while to refresh when I change filters, so I am always on the lookout for technical solutions to speed things up. When 900p came out, I went and bought one. It was the only drive that showed tangible improvement in performance. When I upgraded from a SATA to an NVME drive for example, I saw no change in performance. However, the improvement optane offered didn't seem worth the cost, in that it only cut 10 seconds out of a 110 second load time for a $500 premium.
In other words, I am still interested, still curious about how much of an upgrade 905p is compared to 900p, but I would like to see the price drop further than $400 in order to give it a try. After all, this drive needs an PCIe adapter card to make it work and that's an added cost.
No it doesn’t. It comes with a u.2 to m.2 adapter in the box..
@@Xamy- Thanks, that's good to know.
Intel Optane 905P Series 960GB is now selling on Newegg for $399.99
How bad is Optane’s latency advantage capped if you use multiple Optane drives as a RAID0,1 or 10 for Windows? How is AMD’s software RAID driver doing on AM5?
In CrystalDiskMark I lose RND perf and gain SEQ throughput perf in amd soft raid. MP600s.
Latency does not change with RAID. You can have 50 drives in RAID, latency will be the same in normal use. RAID on mechanical drives does improve average latency, but this is because you often try to saturate IOPS, and mechanical drives have really bad latency and IOPS. On Flash, it barely change.
@@movax20h In theory yes, however the software quality of AMD’s RAID drivers has “room for improvement”, bugs and not updated in over a year.
@@abavariannormiepleb9470 What I said, has nothing to do with AMD RAID drivers. I do not use AMD RAID drivers. I use mdadm and ZFS on Linux.
Shame on me for thinking an answer to a question about AMD RAID Drivers on Windows might be based on data from AMD RAID Drivers on Windows.
Fire sale is only a 15% discount. lol.
@Level1Tech Do you require to have the programs (i.e. games) installed on the Optane drive, for it to be cached - or does it suffice to have it as a system drive?
Or - do you get the benefit of a faster game loading time even with if Optane is the "game drive", and the system runs on a standard SSD...?
I really wanted to make a comment saying Wendell is the man about this Optane firesale stuff. I ordered it, and VaM loaded exactly like it does with a nand M.2.
It takes 60 seconds the first time and it takes 20 seconds the second time.
The scene loading wasn't any better either.
Fortunately for me, Newegg accepted my return and gave me a full refund.
I got some optane to play around with. Not on any kind of fire sale, unfortunately, I had to pay the full 3000 RMB this stuff costs on Taobao, but whatever.
It performs really well as a swap drive on my workstation, which wasn't unexpected, but in ZFS unfortunately it turns out to be a pretty mediocre L2ARC for my NAS' HDD pool. Even after two full days of warming up the dataset before benching it, it only just outperforms the cheapo Kingston A2000 I used before it. It might do better as a SLOG, but I'm a rebel and run my pools sync=off, so...
I do so wish someone who knows ZFS would upstream some SSD optimisations. The benefit wouldn't be just for optane, normal NVME SSDs would also do great with it. Getting 2GB/s on a pool I know can easily push 14GB/s under LVM RAID really hurts.
Metadata special device if you can mirror it is pretty magical
@@Level1Techs Unfortunately I bought one enormous optane instead of two medium ones. I suppose I could buy a medium one, mirror that with a partition on the enormous one, and use the rest of the enormous one for something else.
The workstation has more than enough RAM to just keep all metadata in ARC, and I don't really use the NAS in such a way that it needs ultra low latency, so I'll probably try to come up with some other use for the optane. I might try splitting it in three and running my workstation pool in striped ZFS with each SSD bcached with an optane partition. If the actual topology is hidden behind the bcache ZFS might actually saturate a drive for once. I back it up to the NAS every day anyway, even if it does corrupt I'm not losing much.
I've had this crazy idea of splitting my SSDs into four partitions, encrypting each partition with LUKS to hide the topology from ZFS, and striping all twelve partitions together for a while now, maybe if I throw some optane bcache in there... ZFS and boredom does horrible things to my mind.
@@Level1Techs absolutely. That's the number 1 best use case for it I've found.
Careful with the L2ARC. It will burn through even an Optane drive unless you are constantly hitting the same data all the time.
@@Prophes0r source? How come people aren’t having more dead drives out there with l2arc?
11:35 seems to me preloading would help. Why doesn't windows or Linux have a preload function? It would work like this: you click on an icon and it starts loading the program. While loading it tracks what files are loaded. Now you have a profile for that program. Now I can right click the icon and choose hotload. Hotload means the profile will start to be read into memory and will fill your free memory. When you click the icon the program is preloaded and will start faster than optane.
As long as you have free memory you can hotload programs. It is different because you as a user can tell the OS what you want it to do.
I finally joined the the Level1Tech Forum after a couple of years watching the news, back when Wendel did the first video on Optane, specifically to ask where I could get them (the 118Gb had suitable write for a main OS drive), and what was their use case on Linux - I proposed running my RPi with one: some people laughed: I let Wendel do the talking since then .. ;)
They were right to laugh. There was no RPi with PCI-E support back then...you'd have been accessing it over a USB2 bus.
@@walt yeah, and ??? even over USB2 its still faster than any flash alternative .. gees, if it were left up to people like you, we would all still be playing with rocks
@@paulwratt No, it won't be faster. You're going to be bottlenecked by the USB 2.0 bus with no difference in performance either way. Any cheap SSD will easily saturate USB 2.0's 480mbps link and their latency will outperform USB 2.0's 125μs polling interval.
I remember powering on my pc and going off to make a tea and still getting back in time for boot.
So, update on the optane. I went ahead and got a 2nd stick, despite my better judgement and went so far as to use one of the two p1600xes as a new windows boot drive and (of all things) I'm seeing a significant fps boost in multiple games.
That's right, I got a FPS boost from Optane!
An not an insignificant boost. The two games that stand out the most to me were mechwarrior mercenaries 5 and mechwarrior online.
I changed nothing else about my system and had always assumed I was cpu limited because both games are heavily cpu bound. Despite my rtx a5000, I would struggle to get break 50 fps on both games. Ray tracing was on for MW5.
After switching my boot drive to optane and doing nothing else, I saw that 30-45 fps go to about 70- 90!
I nearly double my fps from changing my goddamn boot drive! 0_o
I even used the same steam apps folder install of both games from my previous system running off of a pcie3.0x4 nvme.
My guess, based on watching which disks were being used when running both games, was that there was some stupid driver overhead going on where the games were caching files, shaders maybe, to my boot drive.
Looking deeplier, I see that many games frequently access driver files and cached shaders from disk during game play.
Thus the stupid low latency of optane really seems to grease the wheels of some graphics pipelines.
Either that or my old nvme was mega mid level, lol.
Either way, if you're game, you might want to benchmark some games to see if optane has any effect on their fps.
P1600x is really underrated. At a queue depth of 1 it can literally match the p5800x in random reads for way cheaper. On my system with it as my OS drive and a 13600k I'm getting just about 105-110k read iops at qd1 with most reviewers with the p5800x getting 95k-110k. Sequentials are mediocre especially the writes but the drive is so small it's basically irrelevant and you get basically all of the throughput at qd1 sequentially unlike nvme drives which get like 30-40% worse sequential performance with only 1 queue. Only real complaint with the drive is the fact that it doesnt scale in random performance with higher queue depths nearly as well as it should (roughly 60% more iops at qd2 vs the typical 90%). Was hoping up to qd4 it'd be like a p5800x randomly but it seems that's only true for qd1 but it's massively cheaper so oh well.
Boots are about 10 seconds quicker than my wd sn850x (flagship gen 4 drive) and system performance is much better too.
Do you think I should buy primocache tho? I'm currently on trial and using 32gb of my optane as l2 for my wd drive which now contains most of applications and all but 1 of my games. Games seem to load a few seconds quicker but even then I'm not sure and that's all I use on primocache and it eats up about 3gb of ram so idk if $30 is really worth it. Main benefit would be as you said potentially smoother frame times in some games and having a cache like that is the only way to get most of the benefit if there is one across all games
I'm broke af and have been using the 58GB and 118GB sticks in mini Proxmox hosts to use as host & guest swap, and LVM cache ... works a treat
I just put my p1600x on the cpu attached slot and now its literally matching the p5800x in qd1 random reads. What an absolute gem for $50. Writes went up by even more but the p5800x still can do like 100k while my 1600x does 80k but still good nonetheless. Sequential is the only downfall and i actually mean sequential latency not really bandwidth, its signifcantly worse than my sn850x even if im pretty sure its less important to sequential performance in general.
Serious face gains over the past few
Months. Good job! As always, great content
these are more expensive here the last few months (retail Netherlands). interested in low latency for audio production ("real time" is a thing there).
I feel bad for the people who don't get the opening reference 😂
The 960GB one is exactly the one I want to make all my HANA go nice and fast…
Yeah I need to know what add-in card that is at 2:45 it's exactly what I've been looking for.
As soon as I saw that card, I searched for "2:45" to see if anybody else was asking (and hopefully had an answer)
I could use a few of those things.
Well a great year that was batyushka Wendell I hope next 2023 year will be even better Happy New Year batyushka Wendell and a very Merry Christmas!!! Servers rule!!!
Intel once again blows a massive technical breakthrough by not explaining properly to its customers the proper uses of Optane. Depending on your needs, it could be a perfect solution that has no real direct competitor. But they never want to admit its weak spots, so they didn't connect with an audience, and now they have to write off hundreds of millions of dollars.
In the last year, I see my custom build loading in 18 to 23 seconds and I'm on my UA-cam page, and in 3 to 5 minutes I've opened 4 to 5 pages and loaded my BF 2042 game within 7 minutes most days of the week. I've been thinking about Intel Optane SSD 905P but from what I see here with video it's too little to late so until we get into 8k gaming I may not be able to benefit from Intel Optane. Without going in to detail about the time when I was wanting to have Optane I just made my own and the card is able to support (6 ) m.2 with x4 4TB 3.0 drives at the speeds I'm getting optane may not work for me unless I'm able to somehow cache the whole 128GB of memory. In fact, the way the new AI Tech is going by 2025 10k for me may be a thing of the pass. Thanks for the helping me fulfill some old thoughts about these types of drives and there may be a place for them in the future.
Fuckin wonderful we live in an era where NVME is competitive and deathly cheap.
Seriously, though, just switching the firefox cache to the optane stick was like night and day. Most of the random hdd access my computer does, comes from web browsing and that constant reading and writing of small data was causing even my nvme ssd to thrash. now with optane everything loads faster than I can blink and my latency is as placid like a lake. Better still, my nvme ssds can now load big huge apps without constant interruption from firefox. it's so good, so good!
I haven't seen this much love for Optane since Linus was taking money hand over fist from Intel to promote it when it launched.
...So actually, I haven't seen this much love for Optane ever, since sponsorship != love.
"I am feeling better, I think I will go for walk"
You keep making me want to spend more money on my computer. ;-)
Sooooo tempted ;)
Wendell you look great! Healthier than ever
Is the fire sale a us only thing? Still looks to be more than full price in the rest of the world
That was a great primer to (the dead) Optane, now to find some... Thanks from Down Under
Impossible to find a seller - even following your links in the video description.
Thanks Autumn
Wish that "Fire Sale" was available in the UK... Alas... I need to move to Texas.!!!
The monty Python beggining is awesome!
I havea total of 17 optane dirves 4 of them being the 960GB 905P U.2 varaints.
What do you use 'em for?
Thank you! I have been in love with 905p 960gb since it launched. I feel so spoiled by it. I actually grabbed 2 of the discounted ones recently to homelab with in RAID 0.
Problem would with that, a RAID 0 setup will increase latency. Question is, will the increased latency of RAID 0 be enough to slow the dual Optane down to NAND speed?
@@javaman2883 I'v heared that using RAID solution like HighPoint SSD7580B not only does not increase latency, but can even reduce it. Unfortunately I have no opportunity to check it.
Need to test optane as a cache disk.
"I got better" haha love the Monty Python reference
Ok stupid question, why is the 990 Pro so slow on boot? Is this an AM5 thing? My AM4 system with a Seagate 530 Firecuda 2TB for the boot drive will boot in 7 seconds… I am genuinely confused here.
Whole system specs
MSI X570 Godlike
5950x (water cooled)
64g RAM 4000 CL16 (overclocked and water cooled)
4 Firecuda 530 drives
ASUS 3090 Strix (water cooled)
It's because I've got so much cruft in this image. I picked it specifically to use to clone to both drives rather than doing fresh installs. Imagine a year's old windows install and how wonky they get
@@Level1Techsok… I think I am understand now. Optane is wild, I think I’m going to pickup some of the M.2s for my workstation, I do a lot of back and fourth between Blender/Zbrush all in one sitting as well as other Adobe apps such as photoshop… aka unoptimized shop. Optane may be useful, I have to keep learning about it.
@@Level1Techsoh and thank you for the reply!!!
54 seconds to boot? Why is your boot so slow?
I could be mistaken, but it seems like you would want low latency over high peak/sustained read/write speeds, unless you're actually copying, you know, 3GB/s+ of data, but when are you doing that? If you're downloading a game from Steam... well your internet connection isn't 3GB/s down. If you're regularly copying large files, like RAW image or video, to your fancy-pants PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD, you're still at the mercy of the source drive, which is probably much slower than a PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD nevermind 4.0.
In the (I think) rare case where you're copying large amounts of data from one NVMe SSD to another (both being connected to the same computer/CPU via PCIe bus and not USB C/SATA/whatever), it's nice to have that high read/write speed, but again that seems like such a rare thing. I can't think of a time where I was reading or writing a file larger than 3GB, and the source/destination drive wasn't way freakin' slower than the NVMe SSD.
So I would much rather have the low latency for when I'm booting the OS, and doing things like updating all the little dependencies in my JS/Python/C# code. That's what'll getcha as a software engineer. Copying say 20MB worth of NodeJS packages from the npm_modules folder takes longer than copying say a single 1GB zip file because of the overhead that comes with moving/copying a file.
Oh shit Wendell has been slimming down it seems. Keep it goin man!
Those deals I need in Germany
If only.
The problem isn't that we need faster drives, the problem is automatic updates lol even a $50 sata ssd boots in under 7 seconds and nobody can tell the difference between a 7s and 5s boot. The cheapest nvme work just fine for any system that isn't a server imho
Holy fuck you lost some weight since last time a watched you, great job man, health is the most important, keep up the great work!
Dude, that low profile 4x m.2 riser. Where did you get that? I've been trying to find one of those for ages, with 4 m.2 drives on a single sided low profile bracket, for basically exactly the use case you're using it for here!
Ebay
@@Level1Techs Got a product page or exact model name? I've been searching ebay, amazon, and even google for like three days looking and can't find one like that
@@Level1Techs I too would be interested in more details as all of my eBay searches come up with the the dual sided cards. (and I can't manage to squeeze a dual sided one into any of my servers) Also, I see a bunch of what appears to be solid state caps on the card. Does it have some power loss protection?
I almost was wondering how much my bios slows it down or if it does affect it at all ??
First BIOS boots than it starts the bootloader from the "disk" drive.
So, the first seconds are due to the BIOS startup.
And this can be longer than the actual load time of an optimized OS on SSD's after that point.
Yeah... With a decent SSD, booting time for Windows was never much of an issue for me, the BIOS part is. Total booting time _increased_ when I moved from a SATA drive to an M.2 NVMe because of how the board polls peripherals. And if you got more cards in there, it'll take longer.
So it may not help for games but it does help with reboots.
I still don't understand how you would use optane. Is it just like back in the day when you had your one ssd with your most important games and your os on it while everything else is still on hard drives?
OK so if I've got a just OK NVMe SSD drive would it be worth getting one of those 118GB Optaine drives and use that Intel software to cache SSD?
Since Optane is being closed down, I wanted to buy a dozen large storage NVMe's to use, in a couple of 4x4x4x4 PCIe cards, for TrueNas. But I have a 32C-68T AMD Epyc CPU, and I hear I cannot use those things together.