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  • rocky12345 - Friday, April 28, 2017 - link

    I was all excited about these drives until I found out that Intel is not sharing the tech and AMD won't be getting to use it in their Ryzen platform at all. I plan on getting Ryzen 2 in a year and thought hey one of these little 32GB cache drives would be a nice speed booster. BUt the guy form AMD on another site confirmed that Intel owns the hardware rights and is not sharing it. He went on as far to say if you got a SSD drive why would you need it anyway. He is right and wrong in the review I read it showed the 32Gb version making a Spindle HDD work at SSD speed like speed in reads and a bit faster in writes but it also showed that if you have a sata SSD it even uplifts the performance for them a bit as well because of the 600MB's speed limit on the Sata bus. Oh well I guess a new NVMe drive is in the works for my next build...lol
  • fanofanand - Friday, April 28, 2017 - link

    Instead of listening to your buddy or some random person in a forum, try reading Anandtech's review of the product. Optane caches are pretty much worthless unless all you do is e-mail and surf the webz.
  • haukionkannel - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    According to Anandtech rewiev optane cache is quite usefull... I have a guite a lot games in normal HD and only one or two in ssd, so this would speed up my game leads considerably.
  • Samus - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    It is completely useless and not cost effective simply because
    1) it doesn't consistently bring the speed of an HDD to SSD levels
    2) Optane + HDD is more expensive than a system with a decent sized SSD
    3) it adds power consumptions and footprint so it is a far fetched mobile solution, where it could have potentially been successful since these systems typically only fit one drive
    4) it works with one platform, one series of CPU from one generation, and one operating system
    5) the systems that benefit most are office and home PC's where large storage capacity is not needed. Just get a 275GB $90 SSD instead of a 2TB $90 HDD with capacity most of the target applications don't need.
  • ironargonaut - Wednesday, May 3, 2017 - link

    What is Optane+SSD performance equal to?
  • ddriver - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    Yeah, it is extremely useful, as it will cache that one game, making it faster to load if you load the same game 3 times in a row LOL. Makes it look quite good in some meaningless test.

    But what happens if you run one game and then another game the benefit is back to zero. It will keep caching and never use the cache. Games are huge today, in some cases the hypetane cache is too tiny to even fit a single game. The last few games I played were all like 40-50 GB.

    Besides, why would you want this nonsense in an AMD build? Ryzen will already get to way better value that what intel is willing to offer you, so with the saved money you can buy yourself a nice big M2 SSD, or even an even bigger SATA SSD, as the difference will be negligible.

    Even if you have a board with two M2 slots, the PCIE lanes themselves are wasted on hypetane.

    What boggles the mind is intel's decision to make it exclusive. I bet in their own minds, knowing how the kind of dummies consumers are, the exclusivity would make it more desirable, superior tech that only works on intel's latest and greatest. Plus it could possibly boost platform sales as well.

    Besides, even if better in some key metrics, hypetane is close to useless for 99.99% of the people on this planet, this includes prosumers and most of the enterprise. Making it work on every platform wouldn't really do anything in terms of promoting adoption.
  • Reflex - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    "What boggles the mind is intel's decision to make it exclusive. I bet in their own minds, knowing how the kind of dummies consumers are, the exclusivity would make it more desirable, superior tech that only works on intel's latest and greatest. Plus it could possibly boost platform sales as well."

    Okay, so I guess Intel should make it work on other platforms then?

    "Making it work on every platform wouldn't really do anything in terms of promoting adoption."

    Oh, heads I win, tails you lose. Got it.
  • CaedenV - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    To be fair (hard to do in this case)
    Optane is actually proving out to be quite smart about the things it caches vs the things it does not cache. Most large things are also sequential, which HDDs actuially do a very good job with. Modern HDDs on a sequential read can move along quite nicely at 200-230MB/s which is really not bad, and Optane is smart enough to not cache that kind of sequential data.
    Instead, what is does is cache the stuff that is non-sequential. Stuff where HDDs can barely eek out 20-50MB/s while bouncing around a disc. This kind of stuff (system/OS files, the beginning of large files, etc.) are cached so the HDD either does not need to go through the seek process, or enough is cached that the drive will have time to complete its seek before the cache is spent.

    It is actually a much more elegant system than I first thought it was. Certainly more brains behind it than the crappy RST junk of the past that was truly useless.

    All that said; I am still very lost and confused as to why Intel thinks this is a mass-market product. If you are on a budget then a small SSD or a large HDD are your options, and adding a cache drive is out of the budget. For mobile this is going to kill battery life rather than save it. For the pro market RAID is a near requirement and this will not work with that. For just about everyone RST is a far cheaper and more consistent option... and nobody wants RST... so ya. It is kind of amazing what Intel has managed to do with such a relatively small cache, but it is a product that nobody asked for or wants. It isn't out-right bad (it is rather amazing actually), it is just not needed.
  • fanofanand - Monday, May 1, 2017 - link

    The problem is the cache size is insufficient to actually do what you described above. Unless the user is repetitively using the same programs over and over, the cache is too small to grab multiple programs. When it can be the sole drive I believe the lower latency and speed at Qd1-4 will make it a marvel of engineering. Until then it's a dud.
  • ironargonaut - Wednesday, May 3, 2017 - link

    Hmm... I read the review and I don't remember that conclusion. Do you have a quote to back that up?
  • tuxRoller - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    Why can't this be dropped into pcie on an amd board? It's talking nvme.
    The drive gets mapped by the os as a block device which could be used for swap, disk cache (and pick your replacement strategy), whatever.
  • CaedenV - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    So here is what is going on:
    The brains behind the cache is not on the drive, it is shared between the CPU (no Celery or Pentium joy; only Core chips need apply), and the RAID components on the chipset. Without the chipset and the CPU the drive is just a SSD
    ... except that it is an SSD with no Windows SSD-style driver. Without a driver, it basically becomes useless.

    Unless you take one of 2 tacks:
    1) Use it as a RAID drive. Install this in any board with an m.2 slot, put the mobo in RAID mode, and magically you get an SSD because Windows will use the RAID driver rather than a device-specific driver. Still no caching capabilities because that is something special on Intel CPUs and chipsets, but you can at least get a small drive.
    PC Perspective did a RAID1 across 3 of those drives and got stupidly fast results... for a stupidly high price... but it is an option.
    2) Go the non-Windows route. My understanding is that there are NVME SSD drivers for this drive under Linux, BSD, Unix, etc. So if you install this on an AMD board and run linux then you are good to use it as a SSD... but again, no caching, because the software that interacts with the CPU and chipset are (at least for now) a windows-only affair.

    Hope that helps!
  • tuxRoller - Sunday, April 30, 2017 - link

    To begin when, I was speaking from a Linux perspective, since that's what I'm most familiar with, but the others should have similar features even if it's not PnP (as they said, Windows has its own -not very good, but replaceable- nvme driver).
    I understand what you're saying, and I considered the possible duties the fw may have, but came to the conclusion that the os should be able to handle it.
    You don't need raid, and it wouldn't map to any of the conventional levels anyway. That's why i went straight to the block layer. You can set it, on Linux, to act as your fs cache with bcache, lvm (dm-cache) or flashcache/enhanceio, then set your policies.
    Yes, the fw can do this for you since this looks REALLY similar to srt, but that's windows only. Using these types of stacking methods doesn't require support from the pch.

    If it's not clear how this would work, i can provide some links.
  • fanofanand - Friday, April 28, 2017 - link

    Nice try Intel, but this is nowhere near enough to distract from Ryzen and what that means for the consumer. I would rather have smooth multi-tasking than a bump from 150 to 180 fps in some fps.
  • chipped - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    Waste of money when the Logical Volume Manager or/and Filesystem are not able to control the cache directly.

    It will be frustrating because of the random performance changes as data gets moved in and out of cache.

    Haven't used a photoshop for a week but installed some games and copied some data in? Chances are photoshop isn't in the cache anymore and will open slowly.

    Just buy a SSD.
  • PC24x7 - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    I use ssd on all my computers and I find they run extremely fast. I dont think there is much point in going faster. My hand to eye coordination isnt fast enough to keep up with most operations carried out by a decent pc running an ssd.
  • herbc - Saturday, April 29, 2017 - link

    I agree , a good modern SATA SSD is as fast as i can take , when i boot it takes under 5 seconds , when i click something it comes up instantly .

    No way i would waste money on something else.
  • Agent Smith - Sunday, April 30, 2017 - link

    When using PrimoCache i get 10k read and write caching performance.

    This will not make me switch but interesting option for future builds.

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