Hello,
So what will be the best OS SSD right now? I want to retire my 480gb Optane due to size its PCIe x4 card and i always look for tricks how to install it [modern boards Z690 usually have 3 slots on average, one cuts GPU speed and one i want for 10GB network or capture card], prefer m.2 since these come aplenty.
Basically i don’t do anything that write intensive, but i want everything to load fast, i launch 3-4 web browsers each with 1K Tabs.
I been checking reviews and i honestly cant pinpoint and say: Thats what i want.
Would you say the new Samsung 990 pro 1Tb is the optimal OS drive? or maybe something else
BTW my Optane has 97% health and whopping 1769 Terabytes of writes LOL [but thats in the past]
Not a direct answer, but how old of a system are you coming from? Is a newer Threadripper an option? I vaguely recall even newer Threadripper supposedly launching “soon”. SATA SSD for just the OS is not bad at all; that would get around all that hassle.
The only SSDs I’m aware of that directly position themselves as Optane alternatives are datacenter focused. Samsung Z-SSD and the Kioxia FL6 come to mind. These use SLC flash.
There’s not a lot that can match much less beat Optane in low QD 4k reads to this day, which is like 99% of what an OS drive ends up doing, and if you use hibernate/hybrid sleep with a ton of RAM, that can be 100GB or more of extra writes per day if you have and use that RAM. You can move the user profile to another drive without too much trouble (does require a windows reinstall though) but you can’t move hiberfil.sys since that has to be on the OS drive, so your biggest source of writes can’t be moved (if you use that feature).
I have a 960 905p, which obviously has a bit more breathing room than your 480, but my plan is to use that as an OS drive until an obviously superior tech/drive comes out, and in the meantime get a fast m.2 for a D: drive and use that to install things I don’t care if they’re as fast to and setup some redirects to offload more to other locations, but leave the Optane to handle things like caches, indexes, and heavy writes that either can’t or are less convenient to move to another drive. I “only” have about 200TB written on mine, but that’s a pretty hefty chunk of most m.2 SSD’s life, and an imperceivably small fraction of the Optane’s.
Or you could just get a 2TB 990 and sell your 480 Optane for probably about as much, if not more than you bought it for, those things are dummy expensive on the 2nd hand market due to obscene write durability.
I had TR once, never buying that again, not my cup of tea, nor any AMD, my last one was 5950x + MSI x570 Creation, than i got 12900K and now 13900KF [with same z690 board]
Intel boards usually have 2-3 PCIe slots, i have shared PCIe gen 5, for GPU and one x4 and i have 5 working [not shared] m.2
Intel like AMD has x4 m.2 coming from CPU, so its the best option for OS SSD, i tried using M.2 to PCIe x4 adapter, got 3 different versions, with the slots in both direction but due to the I/O panel having BIG heatsink over it [for the VRM] on one side and RAM close to CPU on another, i cant plug the Optane in any direction.
I can plug it into normal M.2 slots no issues, its routed trough Chipset, also its tad heavy, and the m.2 to PCie adapters are Chinese quality, very thin
Another Optane issue is heat that irradiates and affects closed by devices
I wish it was like you said, but 280GB U.2 optane is 180USD on ebay, i even got one half year ago assuming its “opportunity” and ill keep it as caching for Unraid build, but yesatrday i checked and prices haven’t checked, now the 480GB is more expensive but not that much
Before Chia mining the Samsung Z drives were aplenty and very cheapo on ebay, but since then the price got high and never came back to original price, and these also U.2 and PCie
Im not in need for more space [have over 20Tb just in NAND space], just want something that will not feel slower thats basically it, i want something M.2 compact but I dont want to feel like downgrade, i dont care if its slower on paper, i just dont want to open 4 browsers with 1K tabs each and wait 3 minutes for everything to load. I dont have any special needs, just to not feel like im going back in tech
I moved from an Optane 905p on my last system to an SK Hynix Platinum P41 2 TB and I can’t really tell any difference as far as using the computer day to day. I’m sure the Optane would still have lower latencies but the high end traditional flash drives these are fast enough that you likely either need a very specific use case or storage benchmarks to be able to identify the difference.
Samsung Z available on ebay, but expensive and its U.2 or PCie, FL6 never seen anyone selling those especially second hand.
Honestly i don’t need 1:1 as fast, just to not feel like downgrade, basically if i do my browser test like open 3-4 browsers that have 1K tabs, i want them loading instantly like it is now, that it, and i dont want the system to get slower
Thants good to know.
Do you have any heavy software to load? did you notice any chnage?
I mainly open web browsers with 1K, sometimes more tabs, i usually have 3-4, sometimes 5 open [the tabs of course in sleep mode, only the ones i use are awake and loaded], so im scared it will be slow.
I can get 1TB new SSD, but i also have 2 970 evo plus 2TB that i just pulled from my system and replaced with 4TB gen 4 wd 850X that twas on sale for 370$
Maybe it will be enough to use 970 evo plus? but 990 pro is probally a better option
I think RAM would be a bigger influence over browser performance. Though with that many tabs it is really hard to say. If you just mean the startup operation then bandwidth might be more of a factor, in which case a PCIe 4.0 drive might give you better results than any 3.0 Optane.
I notice in certain multiplayer games I load faster than everyone else, it’s never by much, but it’s consistent. If the game lets people start moving as soon as they load and doesn’t wait for the last person to load, I always move first.
Also been a few times where I had to do searches across a large amount of log files for work, so I transfered them to my personal PC to do the search, the work laptop SSDs are decently fast, esp for a work machine, but not optane quick.
Just get a 990 and make it your D: drive, even on an old PCIe3 machine, since it won’t impact 4k throughput, and setup some redirects to see how it impacts your workflow, see if it slows anything down, and maybe on the new machine make the 990 your main drive and toss the optane in as D: with redirects for whatever benefit from it.
Well RAM is an issue, i have DDR5 64GB 5600 at 6000, I always had 64Gb back on DDR4
The thing with DDR5 is that its expensive and I have Unify-X OC board its limited to two RAM slots but supports easy RAM OC and fast speeds
You right, even with 64GB after some time i get browsers crashing, which is strange, because i have at least half of the RAM free, windows 11 and 10 before that fills the swap file and when its filled it crashes the browsers, even when my RAM is plenty available,
I fixed it by creating 128GB SWAP file min/max and from that point in time i had zero crashes, before on Automatic [which should work the same way as min/max custom] i had daily crashes due to swap file filled up
Maybe I should wait for what comes next, to see the PCIe Gen 5.0 controllers, maybe they better, right now im getting on 850X 90MB/s 4KQ1 reads and 400MB writes, on Optane i get about 150MB/s for both
I googled more Optane reviews, comparing to recent SSDs, and the biggest plus is that it doesn’t have recovery mode, but its only relevant if you going to fill the drive with write commands, it never drops in speeds, but NVMe goes fast, drops to bottom and then enters recovery phase
you mean to use optane as cache for 990? I think i can enable intel optane to do the same [or it doesnt work with NVMe?],
but i kinda want to not use any PCIe cards, need slots for 10G lan and capture card
I dont need anything extra for storage, just to deal with OS Only drive, i have over 20tb of sd storage and just got another one last week,
Looking at the future, I do want to get 8Tb enterprise SSD as Downloads drive, but right now even on ebay 4510 is tad expressive, maybe in 2-3 months NAND will go down even more
I think the Optane is meant as cache for a slower, but larger second SSD. The use case you describe is valid, but represents an absolutely top end performance requirement.
Should the Samsung 990 be too slow for your needs you need to upgrade to an Optane P5800X.
The Intel Optane Memory / Rapid Storage Technology option you speak of has a size limit that is much smaller than your 480gb drive as I recall. What Wendel was referring to was booting off the M.2 NVME 990 and using the Optane drive with Primo Cache to provide support to a large secondary storage volume like a cheaper 4TB or so SATA drive.
Unfortunately, if you want to use both a 10GBE AIC and Optane AIC; you’re stuck waiting until Intel finally brings back HEDT IMO. These newer Intel consumer platforms may have added a dedicated 4 lane slot for NVME to bring the lane count up to CPU 20 PCIE lanes on consumer, but they also removed the ability to 8x/4x/4x bifurcate the 16 primary lanes so you still can only have a total of 3 devices on CPU lanes. 2* 8x devices and the M.2 or 1* 16x device and the M.2
As far an alternative to your current boot device on intel consumer platform - you could buy the 960GB 905P U.2 on sale for $400 at Newegg and utilize an M.2 to U.2 converter on the M.2 CPU slot. Then you have your dedicated M.2 utilized, your GPU has it’s 16 lanes and your 10GBE going thru the chipset. Or split the CPU lanes 8 to GPU and 8 to 10GBE if you got a board with dual CPU slots.