Optane as OS drive (vs 960 EVO)

DesiPower

Lifer
Nov 22, 2008
15,299
740
126
Building a new PC, i5-8600k on Asrock Taichi. I have a 1.5 year old 960 EVO 1tb ssd, thinking about getting 120gb optane for OS only. Total waste of money? or will I see any improvement in performance in day to day activity, light gaming, web browsing, MS office, etc. Current PC is i7-6850k
 

UsandThem

Elite Member
May 4, 2000
16,068
7,380
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You won't see any "real world" performance difference in the tasks you listed. The 960 EVO is still a very fast drive, especially the 1TB version.

Save your money, or upgrade the CPU to an i7-8700k instead (or the 8700 if not overclocking), or some other cool tech that you've been eyeing.
 

DesiPower

Lifer
Nov 22, 2008
15,299
740
126
cool! will do, thanks. Any type of maintenance needed on 960 EVO before installing new OS? Any standard procedures for nvme? do their performance degrade over time? If so any way to revive them? maybe reset them or something...
 

IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
8,686
3,786
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I'm pretty sure you will see a difference. But it'll probably be not worth the price. The low capacity drives are really for caching as the sequential speeds are limited by the controller. For full performance you have to go for the 900P/905P, the smallest of which start at 280GB and costs $392 at Newegg right now.

do their performance degrade over time?

The TRIM command will alleviate performance problems for the majority of users(exceptions always exist). You run TRIM using the application from Samsung, or by right clicking on the drive and clicking "Optimize".

If cost is absolutely no concern to you, yea go Optane, and go for 900/905P. It doesn't need TRIM, it doesn't ever run out of DRAM caches(which NAND drives need) and doesn't care whether its full or empty. On top of that it's got phenomenal random read/write performance.
 

nosirrahx

Senior member
Mar 24, 2018
304
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Optane is a cool tech toy for people that like to experiment with new technology or have expendable income.

Even though I personally love Optane I cannot recommend it to typical users due to the price point, it cannot be justified for anyone on any kind of a budget.

The sole case I could recommend it based on price is if you were going to buy a new 2TB 970 EVO. In this case a 2TB 860 EVO cached to a 58GB 800P is both faster and cheaper. Other than that, Optane is always the more expensive choice.
 

cbn

Lifer
Mar 27, 2009
12,968
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I think M.2 NVMe 3D TLC vs. Optane will get a lot more interesting (from a value standpoint) when see the Intel Optane System acceleration software able to cache M.2 NVMe 3D QLC.

However, I do wonder if finding budget board (or budget pre-built) with 2 M.2 slots will be a limiting factor?
 
Last edited:

nosirrahx

Senior member
Mar 24, 2018
304
75
101
I think M.2 NVMe 3D TLC vs. Optane will get a lot more interesting (from a value standpoint) when see the Intel Optane System acceleration software able to cache M.2 NVMe 3D QLC.

However, I do wonder if finding budget board (or budget pre-built) with 2 M.2 slots will be a limiting factor?

It is easier to find a gen 6 CPU based laptop with 2 M.2 ports than it is to find a gen 8 CPU laptop with 2 M.2 ports unless you want a gaming system. Since NVMe SSDs crossed the 512GB barrier with decent prices there hasn't been much of a reason to provide a more typical form factor laptop with the ability to connect multiple drives. Conventional SATA + M.2 NVMe is also not super common. My Asus VivoBook Pro was one of the only systems I could find that let me do an Optane setup on a non-gaming laptop.

On the topic of NVMe + Optane, I wonder if a new form of RAID could be created. Imagine if the Optane driver could read both the NVMe drive and Optane drive at the same time but read one of them in reverse byte order. Instead of RAID 0 where data is striped and read from 2 drives at once the data (when cached) exists on both drives and read requests go to both drives but one of the drives reads the data starting at the end of file. This would allow all files to load faster than either NAND or Optane could do on their own.
 
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