Last night I found a year old video on intel Optane H20. Looked for it on eBay out of curiosity, and only found 1 seller. Not very cheap.
Then I looked up H10. More people are selling it and not at a terrible price.
At work a lot of us have a intel 10700 Lenovo workstations with regular 2.5" SATA SSDs, and after watching the above video I looked and found intel RST is also installed (18.6ish), probably courtesy of Lenovo.
We build Angular apps for enterprise, and .NET 6 services. I wouldn’t say anything is slow on our machines, but we run a lot of VSCodes and Visual Studios. Any point in investigating H10 benefits in our systems? For example does it make node/npm run builds or tests or lint faster?
I read the other day that intel is dropping optane, so it’s not a solid investment, but unfortunately I get very enthusiastic about things I definitely shouldn’t be spending money on.
Looked all day to find something that doesn’t need a D&D textbook to get up and running. Some obvious ones like angular/components and angular/angular required yarn, and couldn’t even build/test/lint them, so I’ll leave those to the coffeehouse MacBook devs.
Found ngx-admin which is kind of a good age (not too old/new), Angular v12, and only needs npm. No tests or lint tho, oh well. At work we’re on NodeJS v14, latest LTS being v16.
I tested with
PC 1: intel i7 10700, 32GB 2666 memory, Samsung 1TB gen3 nvme SSD (PM981a ?), Windows 10 Pro
PC 2: Ryzen 5950X, 32GB 3600 memory, Seagate 1tb gen4 nvme SSD (FireCuda 530), Windows 11 Pro
laptop: intel i7 10710U, 32GB 2666 memory, WD 512GB gen3 nvme SSD (SN520), Windows 10 Pro
git clone https://github.com/akveo/ngx-admin.git
npm install
initial:
PC 1: 146296ms
PC 2: 43000ms
laptop (plugged in): 68825ms
rm node_modules && npm install
PC 1: 90130ms
PC 2: 40237ms
laptop (plugged in): 61575ms
Don’t know much about npm’s cache strategy, but I think initial request does network calls for missing packages and subsequent calls just hit the local cache.
Ran some build tests
npm run build
initial:
PC 1: 155592ms
PC 2: 131998ms
laptop (plugged in): 189686ms
run build again without changing anything:
PC 1: 43819ms
PC 2: 35820ms
laptop (plugged in): 53604ms
laptop (unplugged): 59031ms
Sidenote: after all this I wanted to give the official Angular repos another shot, which required NodeJS v16, so I upgraded my laptop, because that was the least consequential move. Didn’t have any luck, but I tried running ngx-admin builds again, and the finish times increased. Maybe there’s some regression there with npm.
Just did a quick test on Ubuntu 20.04 under WSL on windows 10 (which has Quite Some Overhead) on a 375gb 1st gen Optane:
found 70 vulnerabilities (9 low, 25 moderate, 35 high, 1 critical)
run `npm audit fix` to fix them, or `npm audit` for details
real 0m44.259s
user 0m55.750s
sys 0m46.453s
That’s an i7 10700k/32gb ram. " More ram " helps offset the need for optane as things cache in memory, however optane writes and acknowledges very very fast.
I intend to try this on “bare metal” linux on this same machine also.
Will test the h20 machine soon; likely it’ll be about the same.
Sorry, forgot the OS. Updated my previous comment, tested with Windows 10 (PC1, laptop) and 11 (PC2).
Was also thinking of running it under WSL2 Ubuntu, but in my head that seems a bit too abstracted away from the hardware to give reliable results. Maybe I just don’t know enough.
My H10 arrived today, gonna try it in my laptop on the weekend.
Edit: apparently optane requires special bios, that can make sense of the two-part drive. Bios that my laptop doesn’t come with. Fortunately my work PC does, so I can at least try it in that.
Seems to me it really isn’t worth getting these things second hand, cos you either bought a device that can use it and likely won’t need a replacement, or there is no way you’ll be able to use it cos intel has everything locked down.
The H20s are finally getting cheap now. They could be hand for less than $75 for the 1TB model.
What I’ve found about the H20 is that some deep system support is probably necessary. Putting the drive behind a Thunderbolt (Titan Ridge) enclosure exposes only the 1TB NAND, and putting it in a 2 × M.2-to-U.2 adapter (which puts the drive behind an ASMedia 2812 chip) exposes only the 32GB Optane.
I’ve entertained the thought of getting a Y-cable to connect two different ports to the H20, but at $86.25 a pop for the cable, it’s probably better to get a NUC 9 for $550 that’s guaranteed to work with these devices. AnandTech had already found them to be incompatible with a variety of set-ups, and It’s absolutely not worth the resources to make this product work. For $75 plus the cost of that Y-cable and a M.2-to-U.2 enclosure, I could have a 118GB P1600X and the best 1TB+ NAND paired up.