What is/was Intel Optane?
I recently got my hands on an HP Pavillion gaming laptop. I opened the bottom to check the storage on board I noticed that the NVMe slot was already filled with this Optane stick. It wasn't on the disk management list when I checked prior to opening it up so I did a little research, though its still a little confusing for me.
From what I gathered this is supposed to work like RAM, but it doesn't lose everything when it loses power. Kinda like an older game cartridge with a battery back up.
This thing was paired with a pretty decent ssd already, and I assume this laptop was released not too long ago from what I could tell, though I haven't dug too deep into the model number. (16-a0032dx)
This brings me to the question, what was the benefit of using this over a regular 500gb/1tb nvme?
Optane was a type of non-volatile storage which slotted betweenRAM
RAM has a latency around 100 ns, flash has a latency about a thousand times slower, 100 µs. In capacity, they're the other way around. The price of 128 GB of RAM is about a thousand times higher than 128 GB of flash. In small transactions relative to available bandwidth, latency dominates performance.
Optane had latency in the 1 - 10 µs region, still a lot slower than RAM, but ten to a hundred times faster than flash.
Unfortunately, PC architecture has evolved in such a way that it very effectively masks its extremely slow storage. If my CPU is running any given instruction stream, it will spend around 70% of my time in CPU registers. The 30% of the time it's waiting on a load, another thread can run. The load first hits the L1 cache ~1 ns, 32 kB commonly, and 98-99% hit-rate. If we miss L1 cache, we go out to L2 cache. This is 4-6 ns, 256-1 MB, and has a 95%+ hitrate. Finally, if we miss L2, we drop to L3, usually a victim/prefetch cache. This is ~20 ns and will have around an 80-90% hitrate.
So, to have to go out to RAM at all, we need to miss that entire caching stack: we're looking at 10% of 5% of 2% of 30% of all operations. Only when we go to RAM does storage performance even remotely come into it, as we can treat RAM as another level of cache. If the data we want isn't in RAM yet (effectively missing that cache) we have to go to storage for it. During performance critical tasks, this is as close to 0% as to not even be mentionable.
Optane was a cache after RAM and between storage, but we've been dealing with awfully slow storage for so long that this is almost never performance critical. Programmers know to get their data into RAM long before it'll ever be used and, in many cases, even if it has a remote chance of being used. So Optane, which was caching after RAM but before storage, had extremely diminished effects. Unless it could cache all storage (in which case it would replace all storage!) or at least a very large quantity of it, it was useless.
As the SSHD (HDDs with a tiny SSD to cache them, also called "hybrid drives") found out, this did absolutely nothing for system performance and really only cheated on benchmarks: The test file in Crystal Disk Mark will fit into the SSD buffer of a hybrid drive, giving results like this.
So as Intel and Micron, developers of the "3D X-Point" technology Optane used, could not bring its cost down to competitive with flash, Optane had no place in the market and was wisely withdrawn.
“This brings me to the question, what was the benefit of using this over a regular 500gb/1tb nvme?“
None honestly, it can be useful when you have HDD and game on it because it act like cache for your HDD.
An HDD with an Optane can be faster than sata ssd
"NVMe slot was already filled with this Optane stick" The Optane slot was filled with a Optane module. Optane was designed to work with a SATA drive, acting as a faster cache, never as a standalone drive. I thought there's no way to use it as NVMe, because is not a NVMe slot, despite how it looks. Did you got really got the NVMe to work?
Um, allow me to clarify that I might have gotten terminology wrong.
I say NVMe when I'm referring to the physical device, if the proper term for it is M.2 then that's my b.
I do have my new storage device inserted and it does read it fine, as it's running the version of Windows 10 I left on it with files and everything.
I will say the SSD has become completely inaccessible though, I guess that the Optane did something to make it readable? I'll have to wipe it when I figure out what's going on with the current drive.
No unnecessary force was used, it slotted in like any other NVMe, however the NVMe I used did have both "B" and "M" compatibility, so it was double pronged on the end
Okay, so learned something new today. I guess the SSD is tied to the Optane. It's an NVMe with Optane on it. So 32 Gigs of it, and the other 512 gbs of storage.
Optane can work with NVMe. In fact, the stick in the photo actually says "NVMe" on the sticker (on top of being keyed for NVMe -- m2.SATA has different keying). The only difference here is that the slot is likely designed to only work with Optane drives, but it still communicates with the drive via the NVMe protocol.
Optane uses a high speed cache paired with a slower speed drive that would be used to increase drive performance for cheap. Downside is that if the pairing breaks, it may be difficult to retrieve data. It isn't really relevant anymore as storage is fast and cheap compared to the time of optane's deployment.
So when you say pairing breaks, does that mean all of what's on the SSD is messed up now? I already took out the Optane, put in an NVMe. I was already planning on wiping that ssd anyways, but I didn't realize it was that... invasive?
When you can't spell obtain
I still use my optane only with primocach now. And in an amd system.
It boosts repeated hdd drive requests. so if i start up a game the first time its hdd time. And after that, it boots close to ssd time.
But because it is relatively small storage, it will replace the files with more recently used ones if you dont boot that game for a while.