Question AMD StoreMI - is it pointless, in this day and age of cheap NVMe SSDs?

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
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Just thinking this through. Planning on testing out StoreMI in the near future.

Was looking at my options:
1) Buy an Intel Optane PCI-E x2 NVMe storage drive, 16GB for $22 @ Newegg
2) Buy 128GB SATA or NVMe SSD, these are basically almost non-existent anymore, in these capacities.
3) Buy a 240/256GB SATA or NVMe SSD. These are more viable, with prices for each around $40 or slightly less right now.

But option 3 kind of begs the question, if you're paying for a 256GB NVMe SSD, why using it for caching a slower HDD at all? Why not just install Win10 directly onto the NVMe SSD? Wouldn't that give the BEST OS performance and quality-of-life benefits on that PC? I would tend to think so.

The only reason why I could think that 3 might be useful, would be if the intended user, was a PC n00b, that didn't know how to change or use different drive letters. (Believe me, they are out there. It's only a few clicks, but for those types of people, those are the hardest clicks in the world to do.)

Option 2 is basically un-economical, as a 128GB NVMe will cost you nearly $30 or so, whereas a 256GB-class one will only cost $40 or so.

Option 1 is intriguing, although Optane Memory (3D XPoint) technology is getting sold by Micron, and current drive prices may be fire-sale prices, with these devices to fade off into the sun-set. Also, these may be somewhat un-economical as well, as if they don't get used as caching drives, they are basically too small to use as OS drives, unless maybe a stripped-down Linux distro.
 

razel

Platinum Member
May 14, 2002
2,337
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Not pointless. I'd rather have more differing solutions to choose from than artificially limit yourself.

Additionally, NVME SSD pricing is not stable. The bottom prices have been awesomely low ($.08-$.10/GB) for almost 2 years now. And I seriously doubt it'll prices will go up fast anytime soon until some other newer, cheaper tech becomes more popular in sales or if miners find a way to use it to make money.
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
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I think Optane and StoreMI is sort of pointless, unless your really strapped on budget, but even then you can get away with bear mins.

OS - Always nVME... So using a nVME accelerator is sort of pointless, as its just best off to run the nVME.
Gaming Drive - unless you happen to be AdamK and you need those sabrent 8TB nVME's, i always recommend users to just RAID-0 SSD's.
They don't take up PCI-E lanes, and once you get close to 3x in Raid-0 they get pretty close to load times a nVME will offer.
Also 256/512GB sata ssd's are cheap, also having them in R-0 since it spreads the data across all 3 drives evenly will give you theoretically 3x the amount of drive writes.
 

biostud

Lifer
Feb 27, 2003
18,193
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#3 with direct storage, new consoles and RTX IO on the horizon, sata Ssd's will not be able to support these features. (atm you're right though)
 

aigomorla

CPU, Cases&Cooling Mod PC Gaming Mod Elite Member
Super Moderator
Sep 28, 2005
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#3 with direct storage, new consoles and RTX IO on the horizon, sata Ssd's will not be able to support these features. (atm you're right though)

i honestly think this will never be the case for PC and PC Gaming.
PC's typically have such very large memory capacity which are still significantly faster then any nVME, that games will utilize more and more ram before going fully dependant on nVME I/O speed.

The only difference will be the load times to unload data onto said ram.
Not to mention GPU's are also being bloated with ram. (6800XT with 16GB and 3080 with 10GB.)

Any maker which relies fully on nVME unless its sony and sony exclusive stuff would be stupid to make such a move, over utilizing ram.