OPTANE EXPLAINED
BENNETT RING got more than he bargained for when testing Intel’s newest memory tech
New
PC technologies are generally wonderful times for us geeks. We get entirely new toys to play with which deliver real benefits to our computing experience – usually faster performance, better visuals, richer sound and a myriad of other wonders. Unfortunately they often come with a flipside – bugs and complicated installation methods. Not to mention sometimes they’re just marketing launches, and don’t really deliver on their promises. We can say without doubt that Intel’s new range of Optane product is definitely one of the most complicated devices to install we’ve ever seen. But does it deliver on the performance increase promise? Before we look at how Optane performs, let’s explain what it actually is, as there is a huge amount of confusion about what it actually does.
3D XPOINT NON-VOLATILE MEMORY
Optane is based on a brand new memory type that is rather different to the flashbased memory we see in other SSDs. Announced by Intel and Micron in 2015, it’s intended to deliver extremely high performance at a price lower than normal RAM, but higher than flash memory. Intel has demonstrated that it’s around three times faster than the best flash memory on the market, and intends it to be used in two ways. Firstly, in rather costly SSDs, and secondly as a cache to speed up your existing drives. In the second usage case scenario it’s basically like those Hybrid mechanical drives that failed to take off over the last few years, which used 64GB or so of Flash memory as a cache to speed up the mechanical drive. However, Intel’s Optane Cache drive is attached to your motherboard via the M.2 slot, and not to the hard drive itself.
The memory is seen as a nextgeneration memory technology, designed to take over when today’s NAND memory can’t scale in density and costperbit any further. While the following is a little technical, it’s worth pointing out. One of 3D XPoints major benefits is that it can read at the bit or word level, whereas today’s NAND drives have to read at the 4K page level. This makes it better at workloads that don’t require a lot of parallelism. The greatest performance improvements will come when used in tandem with a mechanical drive, but as you’ll see it can even improve the performance of today’s SSDs.
Unfortunately, due to the newness of this exotic memory type, prices are likely to remain high for at least a year or two, which makes it prohibitively expensive to build full SSDs from it. This is why the product that Intel sent us was the Intel Optane Memory M.2 NVMe SSD, and not the Intel Optane SSD DC P4800X drive. Despite being only 375GB in capacity, this larger SSD is currently retailing in Australia for $2400, showing just how expensive the memory within is. On the other hand, the M.2 NVMe SSD is just $79 for the 16GB version, and $129 for the 32GB version.
OPTANE REQUIREMENTS
One of the biggest limitations with Optane as an M.2 cache is the list of requirements that must be met for it to work, and which is why
One of the biggest limitations with Optane is the list of requirements that must be met for it to work
we wasted an entire day trying to get it to work. Firstly, your motherboard must be an Intel 200 series board that is compatible with Optane. This is why we chose our usual test-bench to test out the Optane, the ASRock Fatal1ty Z270 Gaming K7. Also, the M.2 slot that it fits into must be an M.2 type 2280 connector with either x2 or x4 PCIe lanes, that supports the NVMe 1.1 spec. The motherboard’s BIOS must also support Intel Rapid Storage Technology version 15.5 or later. So far, so good.
Secondly, the Optane cache can only be used on your primary hard drive that houses your OS. Considering many gamers will use a 128/256GB for their OS install, and then a 1TB or 2TB for their gaming library, this is a bit of a bummer. During the installation of the Optane M.2 cache, the specific serial number is tied to the boot drive. So if your boot drive goes kaput, you’ll need to reassociate and re-configure the Optane software.
When it comes to OS support, there’s only a single OS that currently works with the cache device – Windows 10 64-bit.
Finally, here’s the kicker that kept us stumped for a full day, as there was no mention of this included in the 33-page manual that comes with the review kit. It was only after reaching out to ASRock that we found out why our Optane cache simply was not being detected by the Intel Optane system, even after we’d changed the SATA mode to the correct Intel Optane acceleration mode. With our board, it turns out that it only works with drives that have been formatted in GPT partition mode… which basically nobody ever does, as MBR is the default method. As a result, installing the Optane M.2 cache meant we had to do a full Windows reinstall, and we lost all our data in the process, as changing the partition mode wipes all of your existing data. Sigh. This is our biggest issue with the Optane M.2 Cache SSD – it’s not prominently mentioned anywhere about this being an issue on certain motherboards.
THE PRODUCTS
Even though we weren’t sent one to review, we’d like to touch on the new Optane SSD DC P4800X 375GB, as online results have shown this is one amazing piece of hardware. It’s equipped with a brand new controller designed specifically to take advantage of the 3D XPoint memory. It’s equipped via a PCIe 3.0 x4 NVMe slot, and is currently only available in 375GB size, with 750GB and 1.5TB capacities due later in the year; we dread to think how expensive the other versions are considering the smallest is $2400.
Quoted performance numbers are simply off the chart. Random 4kB read IOPs is 550,000, writes of the same is 500,000. While there are existing SSDs on the market that hit these numbers, they require very high queue depths to do so. The P4800X does not, which should equate to much faster real world performance.
One benefit of the new memory type is that
it’s slightly more durable than today’s NAND memory. This is why Intel has delivered a 3-year warranty, with up to 30 full drive writes per day, though it claims it should be handle this load for a full five years.
Online tests show that this drive is between four and ten times faster than Intel’s Intel SSD DC P3700. It’s also much better for latency sensitive applications, but for the time being it’s really limited to a very certain demographic. Now, onto the drive we actually have, the Intel Optane Memory M.2 NVMe SSD.
CACHING THAT FINALLY WORKS
We received the 32GB model, which retails for $129 and is already widely available. As mentioned, it is primarily designed to cache your OS drive, but it can be used as a dedicated SSD if you so desire, though we doubt 32GB is big enough for most people to bother.
The form-factor of the card is a standard 22x88mm used by most M.2 drives, though it only requires twin PCIe 3.0 lanes. Despite the length of the card, the components on top are tiny, likely as there’s so little memory, so we can envisage even smaller versions in the future. Both memory modules are covered by copper foil to act as a heat spreader.
Intel claims the drive can handle 1350MB/ sec sequential read, 290MB/sec sequential write, 240K random read IOPs and 65K random write IOPs. These aren’t especially impressive, which is why Intel is really pushing the latency figures for this drive. Read latency is 9 μs while write latency is just 30 μs, which is an order of magnitude over other SSDs. Other NVMe drives can rival these numbers, but this is because they aren’t performing them immediately – they’ve already queued up the data. The drive is rated to handle 100GB of data writing per day for a period of five years.
As we mentioned, setting up this drive proved to be a major issue. After changing the SATA mode selection to “Intel RST Premium with Intel Optane System Acceleration (RAID Mode)” our system failed to detect the Optane drive when installing the necessary software. As a result we had to reformat our boot drive to GPT mode after chatting to ASRock, and then performing a full Windows reinstall. We first tried a Windows reset, but the machine failed to boot after that. So we’d
We’ve been sceptical of hybrid drives, but Optane really does seem to help when it comes to mechanical drives
check with your motherboard vendor first that you’ll be able to install this product without having to do a full OS reinstall; it appears not all boards suffer this issue.
We tested our sample with both a SanDisk SSD and Seagate Ironwolf Mechanical HDD. As expected, the benchmarks for the Mechanical drive were much more impressive. As you can see, it never quite matched the performance of the SSD, but Optane did dramatically lower boot times. However, when it came to pairing it with an SSD, the performance improvement was much, much lower.
We’ve been very sceptical of previous hybrid drives, as their performance never seemed to match the claims being made, but the Intel Optane Memory M.2 NVMe SSD really does seem to help when it comes to mechanical drives. However, we have to question whether it’s worth the various upgrades you’ll like need to have (ie a Series 200 motherboard, 7th Gen Core CPU and a full OS reinstall) compared to buying a standard 256GB or 512GB hard drive. If you do have all the necessary goodies, and do need to speed up your old mechanical drive, Optane is a viable option – just bear in mind the many hoops you’ll need to jump through.