Intel Optane P1600X on PCIe 3.0x2 for Special Metadata?

Hardware Hub Storage
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Like probably most people here I’ve seen Wendell’s video on the fire sale of optane drives and their value as a special metadata device. I’m in the process of putting together a new TrueNAS server and it will be on an Asrock Rack x470d4u2-2t. Problem is this board has by default a PCIe 3.0x2 and a PCIe 2.0x4 slot.

It seems the optane drives currently on sale on newegg are the P1600x drives that in either capacity claim to be PCIe 3.0x4 drives.

My question is, for the application of being a special metadata device drive, how much would the half bandwidth affect performance in this application? They will be assigned to a pool of spinning HDDs so presumably still a substantial performance gain.

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Pretty sure it would still be great; the special device is all about random access iops, less about raw throughput.

So the many small reads really benefit

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This was my thinking as well, but I figured I’m also at times a bit ignorant to things like bandwidth limitations so wanted to check with people smarter than me.

Thanks for the input.

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The 58GB tops out at 1870/890 read/write and the 118GB tops out at 1760/1050. Gen2 x4 or Gen3 x2 can do 2000/2000 so you should be good to go!

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Excellent. Thank you for this information! I went ahead and got two 118GB to run in mirror.

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choose the one that doesn’t go through a chipset, there is inherent latency while going through the chipset lans

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Thanks for the information. Just checked the block diagram and on this board looks like they both go through the chipset.

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