Memory

TV2 · 09 Jul 2020

It seems to be mostly marketing hype to me.
I finally took some time to (briefly) read up on it and it looks like it is Intel's brand of triple level memory, something Samsung has been doing with their EVO series for a while now.
They are adding a 16 or 32GB Optane memory chip to an SSD and this cache is supposed to accelerate performance.
If there can be a performance boost maybe it is accomplished with the Optane Driver. I know nothing about that driver or what it does.

It all sounds fishy to me.

Has anyone seen a spinning HDD with Octane cache? I didn't see any in my 5 minute search.

Stigg · 09 Jul 2020

Another thing I really don't like is that it requires software to tie a standalone Optane module together with another drive.

Here is an explanation for a standalone module.

There are 2 Device Manager images. The one on the left is with it not enabled. The one on the right is with it enabled.

JoeShades · 09 Jul 2020

bobkn said:

Probably little advantage.

I'm not sure whether a discrete Optane SSD can be used as a cache for a drive other than the boot drive.

What i was looking at on Dell's site was 16GB of optane Memory plus the regular 16Gb of memory, it isn't an Optane SSD, This is what is says

"32GB: 16GB M.2 PCIe Intel Optane Memory + 16GB DDR4 2666MHz."

Ok but what I just noticed is that I can not get Optane memory with a dual drive it says this

"The Intel® Optane™ accelerated Memory selected requires a single SATA spinning Hard Drive. Please update your selections as needed."

TV2 · 09 Jul 2020

The important thing to understand is that Optane memory is not RAM. It does not work in place of RAM. The PC noted has 16GB of Random Access Memory - DDR4 2666MHz - and that's it.

RAM loses all data when the power is switched off.
The "memory" in an SSD does not lose data when the power goes off - it saves the data like a hard drive. It is different.
Intel is muddying the waters by referring to the M.2 PCIe (Nvme SSD) internal drive 16GB cache as RAM. It is not. It is different. It is a cache to enhance the performance of the Solid State Drive.

JoeShades · 09 Jul 2020

Good info thanks, So the best thing to so is just get an SSD and HDD for files and forget about the optane thing

TV2 · 09 Jul 2020

I'd say so. Take the money you'd spend for an Optane drive and use it to get a larger M.2 Nvme SSD or larher Hard Disk Drive.

thomaseg1 · 09 Jul 2020

JoeShades said:

Good info thanks, So the best thing to so is just get an SSD and HDD for files and forget about the optane thing

I did. I replaced my optane with a 500 gig nvme m2 drive and put my os on it.
start up time is 35 secs though who really cares except overclockers.

bobkn · 09 Jul 2020

JoeShades said:

What i was looking at on Dell's site was 16GB of optane Memory plus the regular 16Gb of memory, it isn't an Optane SSD, This is what is says

"32GB: 16GB M.2 PCIe Intel Optane Memory + 16GB DDR4 2666MHz."

Ok but what I just noticed is that I can not get Optane memory with a dual drive it says this

"The Intel® Optane™ accelerated Memory selected requires a single SATA spinning Hard Drive. Please update your selections as needed."

Not as clear as I'd like, but see: 3D XPoint - Wikipedia

Optane devices are basically SSDs, although they are different from NAND types. I doubt that they're ever as fast as regular RAM.

The motherboard support for Optane "accelerators" with HDDs seems to be of the past. There was a post here about the discontinuation of driver support for that, but I failed to find it. It has been obsoleted by the availability of larger SSDs. A few years ago, SSDs cost roughly $1US per gigabyte. The price has fallen about an order of magnitude.