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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Flunk - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
For $144 you can get a 256GB M.2 SSD, big enough to use as a boot drive. Even as a cache for a slow hard-drive (which means you also need to buy a hard drive, possibly bumping the cost up to 512GB SSD prices) means this product doesn't make any sense at all. Maybe it made sense when they started development, but it doesn't now.dullard - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
Flunk, the reason to get these drives is that an Optane cache + standard hard drive is FASTER and LARGER CAPACITY than the 512 GB SSD. If you don't like larger or faster, then go ahead with just a SSD.bananaforscale - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
You totally miss the point. An SSD is cheaper and irrelevantly slower and you can use it for caching.wumpus - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You can? You used to be able to use a 64GB cache on Intel boards, and you can use a 512GB cache on just released AMD (470) boards [unfortunately, that bit of the review still has [words] under the storeMI section].If you can pull it off, a 512GB caching SATA drive makes all kinds of sense for anything you might want to do with this. As near as I can tell, Optane's only advantage is that they provide the caching software without having to hit windows and motherboard requirements. Which makes the whole "optane is so fast" advantage a bit of a joke.
Wake me up when optane has the endurance to be used with a DDR4 interface (presumably with caching HBM2/Intel system DRAM). This doesn't give any advantage (besides providing the software license).
shadowx360 - Wednesday, May 23, 2018 - link
Windows Storage Spaces or ZFS can do it. Right now I have 2x256GB SSDs mirrored to accelerate a 5x4TB hard drive array. I set 100GB as a write-back cache that automatically flushes to the HDDs, so random write is SSD-level quick. I also pin about 20GB of files to the SSDs permanently and the rest is rotated between free space and system-managed hot files.Lolimaster - Tuesday, May 15, 2018 - link
400-500MB/s vs 1.5GB/s, not really much of a difference, either way you will have to wait for that HDD to write to the cache drive 1st at 100MB/s or less (since they're small files, HDD works faster on transfer with larger files).If you got a set of constantly used files, move those to the SSD, problem solved.
evernessince - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
Or you buy an X470 motherboard or pay $10 to get StoreMI, which also makes a cache but is much cheaper and can use any SSD as a cache, which saves you money, allot of it.CheapSushi - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
You can use any Optane drive like ANY SSD too.Spunjji - Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - link
It's faster in zero real-world situations. It's larger than an SSD bought for the same total money, but not larger than an SSD at the same cost as the optane drive (256GB) + the same HDD you'd use for optane caching. Your point is... flawed.Keljian - Tuesday, May 29, 2018 - link
This is actually not true. It's faster for Mysql/sqlite in 4k situations when the cache is tuned for it. What uses sqlite? - games, most office software, web browsers..