If you’re thinking of buying optane SSD in 2024, you might first consider drivers. Of course it will work with default OS drivers just like any other nvme drive, but you might not get optane’s low latency without a special driver.
When gen1 optane hit the market several years ago, it caused the Linux kernel developers to rethink the nvme driver. To paraphrase (and hopefully not butcher details too badly) the ordinary interrupt-based approach couldn’t keep up with gen1’s 10us typical latency. The driver got a polling mode, because it was actually faster to just spin 1 CPU core to wait, avoiding the overhead of setting up and responding to an interrupt. Later an Intel employee wrote an article titled “Tuning the performance of Intel® Optane™ SSDs on Linux Operating Systems” which is still online and you can find by Google search with those words.
I have personally used a pair of Intel 905 drives in my Linux desktop for the last 6 years. It was very expensive, but really worthwhile for compiling large code bases.
While I’ve never used optane on Windows, at least around 2017 or 2018 I recall Intel had published a special driver for Windows that allowed close to 100K IOPS with queue depth =1 (10us latency). Being closed source and Intel, of course no info about what their driver really did was available (at least not that I ever saw) but it was claimed to allow actually using gen1’s low latency. I also recall seeing it had been pulled from their site when they officially discontinued optane. If you’re going to buy one of the leftover ever-more-scarce 905p drives or even p5800x for use on Windows, first see if you can find that driver. Without it you may get only 60% of the drive’s low latency potential.
The other thing to know about optane drives is they run hot.
You might already know that from the power spec and physical size, or from the fact that both sides of the 15mm thick U.2 drive are aluminum heatsinks. But if not, I’m here to let you know the 2 optane drives I’ve had for several years run much hotter than any similarly sized 2.5 inch SATA drive.
Mine have been happy for years mounted behind a 120mm fan running at a slow 900 rpm. But before I put that fan in the drive area, they ran scorching hot.
Either Wendell’s brain is glitching, he’s typing on the smallest keyboard in the world, or speak to text needs some work. I could still understand it though, which surprised me.
Ignore previous comments about compatibility, that was for Optane Memory, désolé.
You will need an 11th gen or earlier Intel processor that works on an X370 era board, or the equivalent Xeon in order to access the NAND cache on the Optane 905P. The drive will work on newer generation platforms but all you will see is the QLC storage, which defeats the whole point of finally getting to try out Optane yourself.
What does this mean? Trying finding info on the 905p
I’m pretty sure they are talking about the weird H10 hybrid drives Intel use to make long long ago… kind of misleading with a picture of an actual Optane drive at the top.
I think the original reason you needed an old platform for the H10 drives was that there was some kind of weird non-standard PCIe bifurcation going on that Intel only baked into that particular platform. again this is for H10 drives where I don’t even count as Optane.
The article is specifically talking ab out the 905P which is why they have it pictured, but like you said the info applies only to the weird H10 stuff, not the 905p. Whoever wrote that article just has no real knowledge of the product they are trying to talk about. The 905p doesnt have NAND cache, the 905p isnt a QLC drive or even have any NAND at all. The article really should be taken down. The only real caveat about the 905p is that you need some sort of adapter to get to a U.2 port if the MB doesnt already have them, which isnt too hard since m.2 to u.2 exist for cheap, and there are no real issues on pcie gen 3 stuff as far as signalling.
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