Has anyone used Optane M.2 on RAID?

[birdman941]

Curious of results, opinions if it was done.
Benchmarks?

[Korth]

They've implemented Optane caches in the large HDD arrays on the servers where I work.

Access times and general throughputs are definitely faster and more responsive than they used to be. But also definitely not as fast as pure SSD performance. In this application it's an excellent bang-for-the-buck solution, more raw storage available with "acceptable" performance at a given price. In a consumer PC it would be a waste because SSDs offer better performance for the same cost, unless you plan to install and demand some performance from huge HDD arrays.

Optane does not speed up decent SSD performances and it does increase performances of any RAIDs made with such SSDs. Intel marketing has vastly overhyped this technology, it does have a strong niche in enterprise environments, but it's utterly useless to consumers.

[birdman941]

I was looking to see if anyone raided 4 or 8 as a boot drive in VROC,
or on M.2 slots on the board as bootable.
I saw where Tweaktown did it with good results,
but real world I wanted to see of anyone had done it.
https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/82...isk/index.html

[JustinThyme]

For their capacity they are not worth the trouble. I raided 2 of them on VROC just to see what the speeds looked like. A single 950 pro, yes Samsung’s last generation beat two of these in raid on VROC. The only they inched by on was short air depth 4K as expected and only in the read portion. The writes on these drives are horrendously crappy at best, as in surprisingly bad. I posted it up here recently in the rampage raid thread.*

Going with 4 would only yield twice as much crappiness and give you a whopping 128 GB. The only thing these are good for is a cache for a spinner and a SATA SSD which was their *intended purpose from the get go. I had one laying around and bought a second just to see. I had delusions of grandeur on running a raid of these for a boot drive and basic apps then 960s raises as a data drive for all the other apps. Neither is going to pan out without a *VROC key.*

[Korth]

The only thing these are good for is a cache for a spinner and a SATA SSD which was their *intended purpose from the get go.

So Optane is functionally the same thing as a hybrid SSHD, lol, except it'll cost twice as much and populate an M.2 slot.

[JustinThyme]

Well, it does a little better than a hybrid SSHD so long as you are not filling the buffer on a large file transfer. A single will gi e you about 1200MB/S sequential read over the stock SATA SSD of 500 MB/S and 100MB/S of a spinner. run a large file/s though and as soon as the 32GB saturates its back to slow again.

[birdman941]

I will take that as a "no".
No one has tried RAID0 with 4 or 8 Optane modules.
Thanks for playing.

[JustinThyme]

Two of them fell behind a single 960 pro and behind a 950 pro. If you want low capacity, OK sequential and better 4K reads then go for it. The writes stink horrendously. For me its not worth it for 128GB raid 0 drive. Id go for the 900P first.

[birdman941]

The reason I ask:

https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/82...isk/index.html

This was 3 drives through the PCH.
4 drives with VROC should be better.
THIS is why I asked, and specifically with VROC.

[JustinThyme]

Don’t know about all that. It’s pretty much common knowledge the while sequential reads go up 4K goes the other direction with raid0 due to latency.
What you see above is two in VROC.
Yes we’ve all seen all these review sites with the optane memory sticks as at time all the came to be a that’s all there was. Still the only viable Intel M2. *After running a pair myself I question the validity of some of these.*

Bearcats case you could run 8 of these and have a fast 256GB raid 0, now what?*