Anyone got any experience with Intel Optane 905P as a page drive on a Ryzen system?

[Domaldel]

Well, memory is expensive, even now with the price drops.
So I was thinking of perhaps getting 380 GB of Optane and use it as a page drive for those extra demanding situations.
But I’d rather not fork out that much money before hearing a bit what others have experienced with it.
As is I’m using a SSHD as my page drive, and the poor thing does not like that…
In fact I expect it to fail any day now…
So I’ll be needing to buy new SSHDs for the other jobs it did and perhaps also that Optane drive I mentioned.
I’m on a X370X Taichi with a R7 1700 (thinking of upgrading to a R7 3700X down the road)

The relevant m.2 slot is empty.

But yeah, how bad of an idea would it be to try this out?
Do anyone know if that thing will even be registered on a Ryzen system in Windows or Linux?
What kind of endurance does these thing have?
Is using it as a page drive completely insane?

[Methylzero]

I have not had a chance to touch any Optane drives, so take the folowing with a grain of salt.

Optane drives are going to work like a regular NVMe SSD on a Ryzen system.
The endurance of pure Optane drives (not the half Optane/half QLC ones) is stellar, way better than any SSD on the market.
Using it as swap is not insane at all, I mean using swap at all is something you should usually avoid, but if you cannot put enough RAM into the system Optane is the next best thing you can get.

[aBav.Normie-Pleb]

I got 2 U.2 905P 480 GB units and one respectively two systems with 3700Xs for experimentation

• ASRock X570 Taichi (<- should arrive today)

• ASRock Rack X470D4U (<- first unit with hardware defect, have to wait a little before i can take a look at it)

If you or anyone else can make a normie-proof guide (Linux layman) on how to benchmark your scenarios, I can check it as soon as I have a little time available.

[normanu]

On my X470D4U board the Optane 900P isn’t found.
Did you do anything magic?

[aBav.Normie-Pleb]

Will try it out today and then report back, was testing them with the X570 Taichi so far (peachy) since the X470D4U had/has that weird PSU behavior.

[nx2l]

some time this week(or next if I need to get an adapter), I’ll be able to test my 900p with the x470d4u and a R7-2700 (with proxmox 6.0)

can report back later…

[aBav.Normie-Pleb]

Did short Optane test runs in the ASRock Rack X470D4U and every PCIe/M.2 slot is behaving as expected. For more details visit the X470D4U thread.

ASRock Rack has created the first AM4 socket server board

As promised a short test with an Intel Optane 905P 480 GB drive. [X470D4U_0_Overview] When installed in M.2 slots I used an Intel-branded OEM M.2-to-U.2 adapter that came bundled with the drive in its retail packaging. When installed in PCIe slots I used a combination of a Delock PCIe 3.0 x4 to M.2 PCIe adapter card and the mentioned Intel-branded OEM M.2-to-U.2 adapter. Note: If you are using PCIe slot 4, you have to manually set the PCIe switch that controls PCIe slots 4 and 6 from 1x16 to 2x8 or 4x4 in BIOS: [X470D4U_BIOS_1_PCIe_Switch] Then, after a reboot there will be an NVMe details page in the BIOS: [X470D4U_BIOS_2_NVMe] When all is set and done the Optane drive is running at PCIe 3.0 x4 in PCIe slots 4, 5 and 6, at PCIe 2.0 x4 in M2_1 and at PCIe 3.0 x2 in M2_2. The file names should make the content of the images obvious, I didn’t make screenshots of the CrystalDiskMark results since its GUI had a weird bug (scaling?) that made it look ugly AF. I saved its test results to a .txt file. All tests were done with the same Optane unit since I couldn’t free up my second one. [0_x4_HWiNFO_Opta] X470D4U_M2_1_PCIe_2.0_x4_CrystalDiskMark_Opta.txt (2.0 KB) [0_x2_HWiNFO_Opta] X470D4U_M2_2_PCIe_3.0_x2_CrystalDiskMark_Opta.txt (2.0 KB) [X470D4U_PCIe4_HWiNFO_Opta] X470D4U_PCIe4_CrystalDiskMark_Opta.txt (2.0 KB) [X470D4U_PCIe5_HWiNFO_Opta] X470D4U_PCIe5_CrystalDiskMark_Opta.txt (2.0 KB) [X470D4U_PCIe6_HWiNFO_Opta] X470D4U_PCIe6_CrystalDiskMark_Opta.txt (2.0 KB) I hope this helps! BTW it seems that you can actually use 22 (!) PCIe 3.0 lanes; 16 in total in PCIe slots 4 and 6, 4 in PCIe slot 5 and 2 in M2_2. Very interesting since I thought 20 would be the maximum for AM4.

I’m currently typing the report so give it a little while.

[zlynx]

But yeah, how bad of an idea would it be to try this out?
Do anyone know if that thing will even be registered on a Ryzen system in Windows or Linux?
What kind of endurance does these thing have?
Is using it as a page drive completely insane?

I am using the 960 GB 905p as my one and only drive in my Ryzen 3900X build. This drive is not M.2, it is a x4 PCIe card.
It works extremely well in Linux. I have used it for up to 2 GB of swap while building Android AOSP images. I hardly noticed that the system was compiling or swapping, so it is effective and very fast.
Endurance is huge compared to Flash. I have a 480 GB 900p that I’ve been using as a boot drive for a Windows machine since the beginning of 2018. (Hey, free Star Citizen ship!) According to the Intel tools it has never had a write failure or remapped a bad block. Optane is supposed to be a beast for write endurance. I have not been able to find any data on Optane failures in datacenter usage. Either that’s not talked about or they don’t fail often.