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I am confused about intel Optane. I plan to use an

  • ASUS Prime Z590-A mobo with
  • intel i5-11600 CPU and
  • intel 670P 2280 NVMe 512GB M.2 SSD.

I've read that Optane is a special tech to speed up OS loading, and applications start, but I have a feeling that all of this makes sense if the storage is not SSD, but HDD...

Question

Does buying/adding/using intel Optane make sense in my case?

g.pickardou
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  • Note that Intel Optane-only SSDs are being discontinued https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-kills-off-all-optane-only-ssds-for-consumers-no-replacements-planned – Gantendo Nov 17 '21 at 10:32
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    Intel Optane drives are basically useless when a NVMe SSD exists in the system. Optane drives can only be used as a cache. They were discontinued for a reason and Optane never saw faster and product iteration in its entire lifespan – Ramhound Nov 17 '21 at 13:10
  • Optane is basically the SSD equivalent of Intel's Itanium CPU: in theory superior, but beaten competitors that had economy of scale. – MSalters Nov 18 '21 at 14:30

2 Answers2

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Optane is, I believe, a fancy name for fast SSD used for caching. There is little point in adding it to your system as your SSD is very fast and pretty similar in effect- see https://community.intel.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives/Acceleration-of-new-670p-using-intel-optane-memory/m-p/1276119

If I had money to burn on Optane in this case I'd throw it at more memory instead.

davidgo
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    This was my take too. Optane is best suited for systems with conventional HDDs and *maybe* SATA SSDs and is used to cache regularly used programs and parts of the OS. In systems with an NVME SSD it borders on useless. – Mokubai Nov 17 '21 at 11:17
  • Many thx. One problem less :-) – g.pickardou Nov 17 '21 at 16:14
  • It was always bizarre to me that Optane was pushed to consumers at all. The workloads that crave what's essentially non-volatile dram at the price point Optane is at are miles away from anything that makes sense for the home and even prosumer market. – Chuu Nov 17 '21 at 22:38
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    @Chuu Delineating consumer vs prosumer markets are how we got to the situation where ECC ram support and memory overclocking are premium features that are locked out unless you pay for more expensive chipsets. Sure, Optane does nothing for your AAA gaming rig. But for large software compilation workloads, where the entire working set can reach hundreds of gigabytes (looking at you Scala), Optane is a massive boon. But I wouldn't want to pay for a Xeon just to use one... – Aron Nov 18 '21 at 06:26
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    @Chuu There is no such thing as non-volatile *DRAM*. There's non-volatile RAM based on phase-change memory also marketed under the Optane brand. But DRAM is, by its nature, volatile. – idmean Nov 18 '21 at 09:15
  • "Optane does nothing for your AAA gaming rig" - that's all I need to hear. Not that you can buy them anymore anyway. - Mine came with 16g and I ran out of it once when I accidentally had two instances of a game running. How much do you have that it's not enough, doing what? More ram is the *one* thing it came with I thought I'd ever upgrade. Been over a year now.... A larger NVMe SSD would be better. – Mazura Nov 18 '21 at 13:31
  • @idmean: Non-volatie DRAM existed, for instance in the formed of _Battery-backed DRAM_. Sure, at the cell level it was still volatile, but the chips had self-refresh for when the CPU was turned off. – MSalters Nov 18 '21 at 14:34
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This entire comment section is incorrect and ignorant. Anyone who has done side by side comparison of SSDs vs SSD + Optane knows that the latter is superior.

The reason is self explanatory. Unfortunately intel discontinued the product, but the low depth queue read and write speeds are VASTLY superior to NAND Flash, and I mean it absolutely trounces it, that is my PCIE 3.0 Optane 905P SSD from 2018 outperforms your brand new top of the line NVME PCIE 5.0 NAND Flash SSD in 9 out 10 of the most common day to day tasks you use your hard drive for.

Why is this? Well simply because MOST things your system uses your SSD for are random read and writes, not sequential read and writes. Big numbers make for good advrtisements though, and giant read write numbers look amazing, even though none of you have the internet bandwidth necessary to take advantage of the write speed of your brand new PCIE 5.0 SSDs anyway, so the number is meaningless.

That said, I can't even imagine going back to NAND flash alone anymore, the 1-2 seconds of lag you take for granted when clicking on an application because you think thats SOOO FAST is jarring for me because everything is literally instantaneous on my computer, unlike yours. It may be a dinosaur, but the truth is its just plain faster.

Fortunately, you can have the best of both worlds. Using optane as a cache drive on a modern SSD gives you the advantages of that low queue depth random read and write via RST while also letting you fill your SSD up in 10 seconds if you can find an interface with enough throughput to manage that much data all at once.

Anyway, the reason I can safely say the entire comment section is full of ignorant idiots is because this was the core of your question:

"I've read that Optane is a special tech to speed up OS loading, and applications start, but I have a feeling that all of this makes sense if the storage is not SSD, but HDD..."

The answer to this segment the only part that really was coming close to a question is this:

  • Your "feeling" is wrong, Optane is a different type of SSD than the SSD in your system.
  • Yes optane would increase the speed of HDD's but it will also increase the random read writes of SSDs as well.
  • Most importantly, the only metrics you provided as a means to answer your question, YES Optane will speed up OS loading, and applications start times compared to just an SSD alone if you use it as a drive cache with RST. It will also marginally speed up 99% of your daily computing tasks that do anything touching your drives because nearly all such tasks are random reads.
  • Given the above was the only solid metric you gave to measure whether it was a good choice to buy optane or not by, either we'd have to read your mind and assume a bunch of BS, or measure by those metrics, and by those metrics, your false assumption aside, Optane does make sense to buy if you want increased speed from your boot time, startup time, OS operation, and application startup, loadscreens, and tasks within applications.

Unfortunately, the tech industry is filled with a bunch of blustering idiots who don't know a thing about the technology they spout on about acting like they're experts. Too bad.

Learn yourself something, and get some optane drives before they sell out in case someone in the industry doesn't figure out how amazing a product it is and revive it: youtube.com/watch?v=tSUMBeaaiOo

Nicholas Johnson
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  • Welcome to SU. Please take the [Tour](https://superuser.com/tour), check the Asking and Answering -sections in the [Help center](https://superuser.com/help) (especially [how to write a good answer](https://superuser.com/help/how-to-answer)) and review some older questions with [accepted answers](https://superuser.com/help/accepted-answer) to learn how these sites work. These are Q&A sites, not discussion forums; this kind of opinionated long-form blog postings don't fit in the format. You can [edit](https://superuser.com/posts/1774866/edit) the answer to concentrate to the facts. – Peregrino69 Mar 21 '23 at 05:17