Optane Drive Capacity Discrepency. Counterfeit?

Hardware Hub Storage
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I recently purchased several 32gb Optane M.2 drives off of ebay. I installed one of them today into a system running Proxmox 7.3-4 and was fiddling around with lspci and noticed that when I ran lspci -mm part of the line for the optane drive included Optane Memory M10 16GB which is odd considering that the label on the drive says 32GB as does the model number (MEMPEK1J032GAD).

I did some further poking around.

  • df says that the drive is 27949120k in size which works out to about 27gig
  • I copied about 18gig of iso files to the drive and compared the hashes of the copies with the originals. they all matched
  • I discovered f3 and used its f3write and f3read which reports 26.64GB written and read with No Data Loss

After all of this rambling I guess i’ve got two questions that I was hoping some of you knowledgeable folks could answer.

  1. Can you think of any other tests I should run?
  2. Does anyone else have this model of drive and could you run lspci -mm to see if you also get that Optane Memory M10 16GB bit of output?
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All hard drives like to advertise Gigabytes (GB), but actual bytes available is generally reported as GibiBytes (GiB), which is often confusingly abbreviated as GB.

If you convert gigabytes to GibiBytes, you lose a large amount of the advertised space.

32GB comes out to 29.8023 GiB, so there’s still a weird amount missing, which may be some sort of overhead on the drive or something.

I have some 16GB drives that should be like 14GiB, but actually report as something above 12.

Edit Ah yes, it does indeed reserve some space for it’s own use: Information about the Intel® Optane™ Memory M Series

The capacity shown in the Windows operating system for the Intel Optane memory series module is less than the 16GB or 32GB noted on the box, why is this?* The operating system and related tools report a smaller capacity than you see on the box. The module uses a small portion of memory media management and maintenance. The listed density of 16GB and 32GB is the raw density of the 3D XPoint™ Memory Media. The total user capacity remains constant throughout the life of the drive.

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Pcilookup.com only shows a device ID for the 16gb stick. So maybe it’s just a case of the 32gb stick sharing the same device I’d? I’ll have to check when I get home from work.

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Yeah the pci device id is different. I don’t know where the 16GB thing is getting picked up from.

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