Is Optane still worth it?

Hello world,

I have an AM4 system. I wanted to run my OS on a really fast NVME ssd. Came across Optane once again. Is that recommended?

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If it is worth to you depends on your usecase.

Optane shines where you need a lot of IOPS (edit: and longevity of the cells), but NAND SSDs are better for throughput.

So without knowing the usecase this is hard to judge. For most OS installs, it’s probably not worth it considering the cost per GB.

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Depends on your read-write workload.

Double check that literally any Gen4 NVMe won’t give better for much less?

if you Actually do many drive writes per day, and actually burn through NMVe sticks, then yeah, fill yer boots

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Basic Manjaro installment. Or if I would implement this in my server. Probably Ubuntu Server or Windows Server 2019

I’m not sure that is why I’m here asking.

Because Intel Ark says 1200MBps and Samsung 970 evo says 3200MBps

Of course, if money is not an object, then Optane is great. Especially their persistent dimms.

But usually your money can go a lot further / wider with more traditional nand

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well, in that case, the Samsung is almost 3 times better.

I don’t know how much cheaper it is?

Optane has really Really high endurance advertised, but only you know how much data you delete and create a day

970 EVO Plus NVMe™ M.2 SSD - 250 GB
64,90 €

MEMPEK1W016GAXT

41,30 €

This is just the OS. The user files would be on the Intel 660p

Optane is not as bad as I thought.

16 gig for 40, is 0.4 gigs per dollar.

250 gigs for 65 is 4 gigs per dollar.

so optane is ten times more expensive. and a third of the throughput.

also, 16 gigs might not be enough for an OS drive, if it does updates

Would work well as an accelerator / cache for a HDD array though

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I can go 32GB also.

32 gigs should work, if you use another drive for /home.

Unless Windows no longer uses the windows.old folder to keep lots of files around?

That is only used when you upgrade your Windows. So Win7 to 10 and to 11.ch you can completely delete if you want.

Optane is great technology. the price is not bank breaking, and you are keen.

Don;t let my debbie-downer attitude hold back your dreams man

I think Optane came too late tbh. A small but fast cache drive and a big but slow HDD was a really good solution when SSDs of a practical capacity to be the sole drive was prohibitively expensive, but now 2TB SATA SSDs are affordable, and even m.2s aren’t ridiculously expensive. By the time Optane came around I already had a 1TB SSD.

I think ultimately native OS support for n-tiered storage solutions with automatic striping depending on the speed of drives and the frequency of use is the future. I think this is (or can potentially be?) a thing with ZFS and BTRFS, I won’t hold my breath on it coming to NTFS soon, though.

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That is also only 16 GB.

41,30 / 16 = 2,58125 Euro/GB

Whereas for the Samsung

64,90 / 250 = 0,2596 Euro/GB

That is a 10x price/GB for the Optane.

If that is worth it to you for the throughput and IOPS we can’t tell you.

Personally it would not be worth it to me for a regular OS install as it just doesn’t reach anywhere near the limit of IOPS for even a NAND SSD. OS installs don’t have a super high queue-depth anyway, which is where most of the IOPS are coming from.

Not true, it’s used for every major update, i.e. 20H1 to 20H2 or whateverthehell they’re called. Yes you can delete them afterwards, but the space is still needed during upgrade.

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There are 118GB Optane drives for very reasonable prices on Ebay right now. Seems to be overstock from a chinese factory being sold on the grey market.
The speeds of old Optane drives are really bad, though, so you won’t be getting faster scrubs or anything, it’ll just give you lower latency maybe? And a heck of a lot of write endurance, for if you really, really like filling up those drives and then thrashing them some more.

For normal end-user work, even 3D MLC is more than enough to last basically forever. In the enterprise, if you have a very write heavy workload, Optane might not be even that much more expensive than a similar performance SLC drive.

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I would probably opt for a Samsung pro 980

The m.2 optanes haven’t been refreshed so are older models. Older model means even more niche workload.

980 pro has such good workload tuning and perf balancing it’s worth the premium

I have some u.2 p5800x. Worth every penny. And its upsetting to say that knowing they are almost $2/gig

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Those old 16GB and 32GB Optane drives aren’t really any good for a desktop system. I checked on them when I was looking for a SLOG, but the throughput is listed as 140MB/s. That isn’t much by today’s standards. But the latency advantage is still there.

Check out Enmotus FuzeDrive or other similar modern products to get Optane-like capabilities to the desktop. p5800 Optane is still probably the best you can get, but costs like two gaming PCs.

I wish Enmotus would make those drives with PLP :unamused:

This, pretty much. Optane is still great for niche use cases and a 32 or 64 GB Optane is good enough as an OS drive. Also, 2TB NVMe m.2 these days are pretty much as expensive or cheaper as SATA 2TB SSD, here are the two cheapest 2TB I could find (plus cheapest spinning rust for comparison, speeds are max sustained in MB/s):

Part Read Speed Write Speed Price
Teamgroup T-Create Classic 2TB m.2 PCIe 3.0 2100 1700 $159.99
Silicon Power 2TB SSD SATA III 560 530 $164.99
Seagate BarraCuda 2TB HDD SATA III 220 220 $46.99

Anyone not gunning for full m.2 in a new system is pretty much crazy, it’s getting cheap enough that not even the 3.5x space premium offsets the abysmal performance of SATA in general. :slight_smile:

Do note PCIe 4.0 drives will come down in price too, but not worth paying the premium over 3.0 for now, unless you have very specific requirements.

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Wow I was just reading through for the info but wow, I had spinning rust faster than that.

Yes I know not comparable in any other way, just a surprise.