Hello everyone!
I need help installing a P1600X optane,
My system:
8700K
ASUS Z370-A
P4500 NVME (with INTEL adapter to M.2 #2 x4) – boot drive, windows 10
4TB mechanical HD
and the P1600X (M.2 #1 PCIE)
Here’s the process:
After installing the OPTANE card, I changed the bios from AHCI to RST, and booted. I already had the Intel RST software installed in Windows.
I Downloaded and tried installing Intel Optane Memory, but notified:
“Intel Optane memory application cannot be installed together with Intel Rapid Storage Technology”, and suggestion to uninstall RST and restart the Optane Memory app installaion.
Tried uninstalling RST, but notified:
“The Intel RST driver that is part of this software may currently be controlling the HD that this computer boots from or controlling a hard drive that contains important data. Therefor, you cannot uninstall the driver. However, you can uninstall the non-critial components of this software such as the User Interface, Event Monitor Service, and program shortcuts.”
at this point I decided to ask for help.
Can anyone plese teach me how to propely install and beneffit from the Optane card?
P1600xs are nvme and thus do not benefit from ahci
You also don’t need intel RST to use optane either as they are just regular block devices - same as a nand ssd - switch the bios back over to ahci and just install windows as normal, then you can use optane drivers or whatever but i dont even bother with that either.
thank you for the help!
so it’s practicly usless without new windows install? has to be on it? (it’s only 118GB)
I have lot’s of bookmarks, my PC is knda of an archive, and I hoped it’ll speed things up adding to them and orginizing.
I think they want help to set it up as a cache, the RST driver tells me they are on an Intel chipset, which means it’s a possibility for them to set it up as such.
I’ve not done so myself so can’t give much advice here.
the boot drive was and still is the P4500 NVME on M.2 slot #2.
later I added the P1600X OPTANE on M.2 slot #1.
I thought its OPTANE APP could still benefit me without installing windows on it,
but I learned I can’t use the OPTANE APP because the RST DRIVER is installed,
and the two can’t work together,
and I also learned I can’t simply uninstall the RST driver and replace it with the OPTANE APP without re-installing Windows. (please correct me my if I’m wrong).
so my question, what are the options to still benefit from the P1600X 118GB, without re-installing Windows?
I know of PrimoCache, but didn’t dived into it, because I thought the OPTANE APP will give the same result (but as I mentioned, can’t try the OPTANE APP because the RST DRIVER prevent installing it).
If you cant get the optane software cache working correctly, you can replicate what RST does with PrimoCache. Primocache also lets you undo everything non-destructively and will work across other platforms (like AMD for example). Only down side is PrimoCache isnt free; there is a free trial though and it does make the machine super smoking fast using the Optane drive as a cache.
Lastly, RST some times wont let you cache a main drive that is an NVME/SSD too. Primocache doesnt have this limitation. Its worth the $20 or whatever its cost is due to its ease of use and insane speeds you get by using it.
Thank you guys for helping me
I’ve been trying PrimoCache free trial.
I chose to set it as “aceelerate read”, for safety.
the experience isn’t different than without it, so I probably didn’t set it to its potential?
I’d be greatful for any suggestions!
thanks again!
Optane kicks butt in WRITING at low queue depth; its not the fastest drive at reading. This is one of the reasons some people have advocated for installing your OS on the Optane drive since the OS makes small writes constantly.
Using the Optane drive you have as a cache makes the most sense in a NAS application since NAS devices struggle in write situations. Given your use case (and not wanting to install your OS on the Optane drive due to small size) you could consider just having the Optane drive mounted as a secondary drive (like a D: drive), then route all your temp files to the Optane drive. You can easily change the environment variables in Windows to point them to a different location. You can also set the temp folder area for things such as browsers, etc. to the Optane drive too. You would definitely see a speed increase if you did this (again, given the way you look to be using your system).
In summary, you need to use the Optane drive in the areas its awesome. #1 - write speed (and exponentially so at small queue depths), #2 - they dont wear out when using them at write intensive workloads, and #3 their performance stays the same regardless of how full or how many times they were written to.
That’s backward from my experience. Flash SSDs with ram cache seem to be just as fast at small random “writes” since it’s really just taking it into its ram. For random reads that aren’t cached is where I’ve seen optane be an order of magnitude faster, but this is based on just a few drives that I’ve done testing with.
IM3CPO, thank you for your thorough answer.
Using the Optane a D: drive makes PrimoCache redundant. I guessed that by setting the Optane as cache, read or write, Windows would know how to make the best use of it. I also guessed that in “accelerated read” mode, it’d act like Raid0 in some cases. I guess my guesses were wrong?
