Intel Optane is DEAD. Long Live Intel Optane! Buy them cheap right now...

Intel Optane may be dead, but it's still useful. Wendell shows us the huge difference it makes when used as part of your ZFS setup!
Cheap Optane here:
www.newegg.com/intel-optane-s...
www.newegg.com/intel-optane-s...
Check out the forum thread: forum.level1techs.com/t/zfs-m...
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Intro and Outro Music By: Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
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[@Level1Techs]

If this is "backordered" on newegg, your order will be filled, order anyway. its fine :D I was going to release this when they restocked but forgot till after it was live. oops!

[@Designsecrets]

How much is it normally?

[@michaelfitzgeraldnet]

Out of stock internationally

[@ThePeperich]

Well @Level1Techs NAS Caching -> how much faster is 32GB Optane (if you can not buy bigger ones in your region) compared to a M.2 NVMW cache? The other advantage of no need to rebuild the cache aside. Cheers and have a nice time till Christmas Pepe

[@Prophes0r]

Aaaaand you blew up the Optane market. Newegg is "Sold Out" now. Not "Backordered". Ebay has been swept clean of all the reasonably priced ones. I'm SOOO glad I bit the bullet 2 days ago and bought that 960GB 905 drive I've been drooling over for the last month. The prices are back up in unreasonabletown.

[@jeffreywolfe6313]

Would that work in a Synology for caching?

[@WTP_DAVE]

that thumbnail is legendary

[@KHos73]

Yeah soo cool right

[@mtaufiqn5040]

Sad that intel kills a decent product

[@pyroromancer]

intel heavily hindered Optame's growth among personal consumers with their proprietary key requirements to unlock optane for raid use. That was both expensive and not sold for individual use.

[@Entropy512]

Yeah. I have a laptop that came with an H20 - But as a Linux user, I had to disable the Optane side of things to enable dual-booting. Optane failed because Intel intentionally pigeonholed it into a limited-use niche.

[@moneybilla]

@@Entropy512 wait what fr thats so retarded on intel’s part

[@FakeGordonMahUng]

@@Entropy512 I dunno, I think Intel was looking for ways to parcel out something that was non competitive from a business standpoint in way that could at least come close to breaking even. I was at thr earliest Optane briefings and the use case scenarios were pretty hard to ever justify for consumers PCs unfortunately.

[@SoylentGamer]

At this point your only option is to stack dram cache and NVMe drives. It also really didn't help that it was marketed for gaming in a time when most games were still designed to be loaded from an optical drive.

[@georgebrandon7696]

Nah. What hindered (and still hinders) their growth is a bunch of gamer bois who think loading up their big ram disk is a better option than Optane because it's cheaper. Lol Don't believe me? Look at some of the idiot comments. Probably the same ones who whine that NVIDIA cards are overpriced for what gaming experience they give. Yet the AMD cards they cite can't do what I do with NVIDIA GPUs (AI/ML/Data Science). AMD has a very small niche in that "enterprise use" market, but AI/ML/Data Science isn't one of them.

[@abavariannormiepleb9470]

Note: The green PCIe x8-to-2xU.2 bifurcation adapter Wendell has been using is likely the same design as the Delock 90091 that is also rated for PCIe Gen4. Also available as a PCIe x16-to-4xU.2 variant with the model name 90092.

[@llortaton2834]

you forgot to say "first" as a traveler from beyond time

[@iyke8913]

MVP!

[@abavariannormiepleb9470]

Sometimes I might be far ahead but I still see time as a loop so I’d consider myself pretty retarded if I posted something like “first” ;) I try to only post something with objective content or deeply sarcastic shorts to vent frustration about stuff.

[@nathanleopold8972]

Do I have the thinking correct....if your bios does not support pcie bifurcation you can get around this by getting the 16x card with the pci switch integrated in the card? I am running an old 4770k machine as a server for nextcloud/plex. I doubt the motherboard supports the bifurcation.

[@abavariannormiepleb9470]

@@nathanleopold8972 Yes but cards with a PCIe switch come with a hefty price premium (and more power draw) so it might be worth checking if selling an old platform to migrate to something a bit newer yet still used might make more sense.

[@Owenzzz777]

Such a shame that Intel canceled Optane. Feels like PCIe gen5 and CXL is what Optane PMEM needs to be fully utilized.

[@marcopolo8584]

That's what they were saying before it was canceled, and their reasoning behinc canceling it? "To focus on CXL" (┛ಠ_ಠ)┛彡┻━┻

[@PixelPi]

💀RIP Intel 1968 - 2038💀

[@timramich]

@@marcopolo8584 From what I'm reading, they canceled it because of legal reasons.

[@marcopolo8584]

@@timramich Oh, probably related to Micron's involvement with the tech. That's extremely disappointing. Tech being held back by law. Something should be done about this.

[@timramich]

@@marcopolo8584 Search for an article called "There Is Nothing Wrong With Optane And 3D Xpoint." It's both Intel and Micron who aren't allowed to use the tech now.

[@MoireFly]

I've used an optane for dev git usage for years now, and i recently updated my workstation. However, in plain normal daily use it's still twice as fast as some of the fastest modern ssds. RIP, optane, you will be missed...

[@rootbeer666]

Thanks for the tip. I think I'll put my page (swap) file on one of these. I'm satisfied with my ZFS performance because I don't have much going on with it, like it's not a factor when I want to watch a movie or store my disk image backups.

[@TadanoHitohito]

I remember when Optane was first becoming a thing. A lot of cheap laptops would use it to store the paging file instead of adding more RAM lol.

[@samiraperi467]

And those small Optane sticks aren't much faster than SATA SSD.

[@tim3172]

Yeah, my HP Spectre X360 13 OLED had "48GB of RAM" (16GB RAM + 32 GBOptane = "48Gb Of RaM"). It wasn't cheap, though. It was $1500. The OLED screen is great, though.

[@TadanoHitohito]

@@tim3172 weird, most of the ones I've seen were Walmart specials with Celerons and 2GB of RAM

[@Jushwa]

@@TadanoHitohito I don’t think a HP g60 had intel optane considering it costed more than the entire computer

[@TadanoHitohito]

@@Jushwa I don't know about that particular model, but I remember seeing more than a few computers advertised as having "2GB + 32GB" of RAM a while back

[@jtfernandez5594]

Ordered for my game server / zfs samba system. Thanks for the insight!!!

[@BandanazX]

The price of Optane is still nuts. Often times, RAM is cheaper. Will ZFS just use RAM if it's available to cache that metadata?

[@wayland7150]

ZFS caches everything in RAM given the opportunity. RAM is a much faster cache and the size available these days should be plenty. The Meta Data storage does sound exciting however you need at least two Optanes because they are critical to your stored data. They also must be big enough. I think I will stick to RAM as cache because when I tried normal SSD as cache it actually slowed down a lot for large writes such as virtual hard drive files. An array of 4 drives is actually quite fast.

[@ndragon798]

I tried doing the "find . | wc" not knowing that I had enough ram for zfs to have a copy of the metadata in ram or atleast thats what im assuming was causing it to return in 1.356 seconds with 117265 files. This is against a raidz3 of 12 1tb spinning disks.

[@georgebrandon7696]

Whatever is in RAM doesn't survive reboot. That's the whole point in PERSISTENT storage. It's there when you need it. Don't have to wait for it to load up the RAM every time you have to reboot. And if you're running SQ, RAPIDS, or anything else which loads into RAM? Does you motherboard support more than 128GB? Because all that stuff in RAM adds up quickly. I don't have time to sit here and wait for that rust to be loaded into RAM., When I need it, I need it. Persistent storage is a thing for a reason. There's a reason why Windows and Linux doesn't just load itself up all in ram. (You can do that with Apline, however. :) )

[@BandanazX]

@@georgebrandon7696 Between having ram and a normal SSD, you get all the benefit without paying for overpriced Optane. Optane is great but you can get a boatload of RAM and a normal SSD for less.

[@georgebrandon7696]

@@BandanazX what benefit is that? Having to wait until the data is read into ram, then lost during reboot? Persistent memory is a thing for a reason. If you don't understand why, then STFU. Also, sure, DDR4 is cheap as dirt. DDR5, and ECC DDR5 is not. And it won't be until years AFTER DDR6 hits CPUs and motherboards.

[@namyun2743]

I use the 16 and 32 gb optane as boot drives for NAS and firewall devices instead of USB devices. They work nicely and haven't had any problems yet unlike my USB boot drives.

[@Sard_Onyx]

Bought 2 118gb optane. Thanks for the heads up!

[@TheBauwssss]

Just the thumbnail alone grants this video infinite amounts of absolutely stellar meme worthiness. Oh and this means that the video is also entitled to an _absolutely_ *INSTANT* like from me, as well! (and I haven't even begun watching the video in the first place... oh man.) What you've done with all this power is... is... *MEMEWORTHY!* You absolute *legend!* ! I mean like, if it were up to me then I say that you've hit an absolute _f-ing_ home run with this one, Wendel!! Chapeau!

[@thewallball4915]

Really well done on the weight loss Wendell - looking great!

[@callowaysutton]

Optane seems like it'd be super useful on the dedupe tables where very very low latency and small reads/writes are necessary!

[@dangingerich2559]

I've liked the Optane technology, but it's just too darned expensive. I have a 16GB drive that I use for the temp folder on my main machine. It does speed up installations quite a bit, and takes a small load off my main drive.

[@chounoki]

Why bother? I use RAM Disk for temp and I don't even need to clean it ever.

[@dangingerich2559]

@@chounoki Not enough RAM for a RAM disk big enough for a temp folder. Many installers and updaters use the temp folder and need 8GB or more of space. Even with that 16GB Optane drive, I run into issues sometimes and have to temporarily change my temp variable to get them to run.

[@attilavs2]

* laughs in 32gbs of *RAM* *

[@georgebrandon7696]

Too expensive is a relative term. How expensive is it to keep replacing NVME drives that wear out much faster than an enterprise-grade NVME? 20 years from now, you still have the same Optane device. You might have gone through 4 regular NVMEs. And this isn't just about replacem4nt costs either. You then have downtime to change those NVMEs. Time is money.

[@georgebrandon7696]

@@chounoki Why bother? Because anything and everything in RAM doesn't survive a reboot.

[@dmdx86]

Yep. Rocking 2x Optane 280GB 900p’s. The 900p is (IMHO) at the sweet spot of affordability and performance. They’re getting a little harder to find as stocks deplete but I ended up getting new old stock from a seller in China to complete my mirrored setup.

[@DocNo27]

Optane makes an awesome L2 cache when using something like Primocache. Time to stock up I guess!

[@stranglehold4713]

I've wanted to set up a zfs file pool for awhile now, this is awesome timing

[@jackwhite3820]

I would have liked to see a comparison of the directory scan time against conventional flash storage as well.

[@mannotwiththeplan]

With a fast gen4 nvme drive, I doubt there is much difference. I would rather get a gen4 nvme drive with more space that I can use for other things than an expensive Optane that's pretty much slower in every category except 4k read at queue depth of 1.

[@h4X0r99221]

Still buying all the Optanes I can get, in hope of bridging the time until a new replacement comes out that's as good as Optane. Prices will skyrocket for sure doe, as it's already difficult to get them new where I live.

[@changounchained2648]

Good vid! Keep up the GREAT work! Where do you get those M.2 Adapter cables for the for the 2.5"? TY!

[@BlueTJLP]

I just snagged a P1600X 118 GB for about 80 bucks from Amazon. The very last one I could purchase here in Germany and that's only because it's shipped from the US. I think I'm gonna make it a boot drive!

[@tsclly2377]

You have to have excessive memory to replace the caching function of Optane.. Makes for great write intense applications.. so make a write intensive drive array. Still if these are needed long term, there is no substitution for SLC (100k+ writes)

[@gamersplaygroundliquidm3th526]

Love the Optane support PCIE and Nvme pcie built into the my new Asus Prime X299 Deluxe 30th intel MOBO....

[@Yandarval]

Wendell. This is sadly one of the few times when you have to put US only in the title. Newegg UK, ships its Optane gear from the US. So shipping costs are untenable. Shipping would add 60% to the cost of the 58GB version ($82 all told). That's not far off the base price of the 118GB version. Useful info as always, Wendell.

[@MickeyMishra]

why is it that it's so expensive to ship things to Europe? Or the United Kingdom for that matter? I mean what exactly is there that's so special that everything that is being shipped to the UK makes it so darn expensive?

[@SoWhichUsernameIsNot]

Cries in Australian

[@Blacklands]

Yeah, I can't find any Optane stuff anywhere here in Europe. And ordering from the US is prohibitively expensive. If a seller doesn't have a warehouse in Europe or there are resellers over here, it's often not worth it.

[@madsastvad]

​@@MickeyMishra It's not the freight as much as VAT + toll + handling fees

[@RickMyBalls]

@@MickeyMishra water

[@Ghostdance86]

PrimoCache is very good when using Optane as the "L2" cache. I have 4x1TB NVME (Intel 670p) that have 512GB of Intel Persistent Memory (1st gen) in front of them and 32GB of DDR4 ECC 2666 in front of that. The whole setup gets about 18GB/sec in Crystal Disk Mark for the Seq 1M Q8T1, but 680MB/sec in RND4K Q1T1. Latency is around 5 microseconds. I can't really recommend the Intel 670p, but I wanted a full-Intel stack to avoid issues with VROC (it's RAID0, just for games so who cares if it goes up in smoke). It's a shame that prices on Optane were so high and that now it's all being tossed out like this, I would have liked to see an affordably priced solution like the H20 but maybe using 2+TB of NAND and, well, a meaningful amount of Optane for gaming-like workloads (or other desktop-class use). If this had come as a PCIe x16 card it wouldn't have been a big deal, but it probably would have worked better than having to rig up something like I have. Also, the Solidigm tool that replaced the original Intel one for the NVME stuff is slow and clunky. It's such a shame it all went the way it did, but oh well.

[@dmdx86]

I’m a little skeptical of the ZFS special vdevs. I suppose if you have *lots* of flash storage, the special vdev is a reasonable way to achieve tiered storage in ZFS. For me, I just prefer to use L2ARC for metadata caching since I don’t have lots of space to dedicate to special vdevs. L2ARC can be tuned to cache just metadata or data + metadata and you don’t lose your entire pool if you lose an L2ARC vdev.

[@hotstovejer]

Taking notes for my Epyc Truenas build in 2023.

[@criostasis]

Sold out. $5 off on the smaller one is gone and back ordered.

[@ericneo2]

If only we could get a persistent memory alternative or a caching system like ZFS' for windows, containers, databases and web servers. As it currently stands applications are either written as on disk or in memory without enough foresight that users want a something to load after startup and save at regular intervals or shutdown to disk but run/cached/operate from RAM saving changes to disk.

[@DavidLee-cr4xv]

Bought some 58gb Optane for $35 just now on Newegg. Gonna put it an Asus BR1100 netbook with a Jasper Lake Celeron and 4gb ram as boot drive instead of the default 64gb eMMC. The performance of the BR1100 improved significantly when so put in a cheap NVME SSD, I wonder how much better it can get if the OS and pagefile run on Optane vs regular NAND.

[@theoneblackmage666]

Sold out before I could even figure out how to get it shipped within the US and billed to Canada... wow.

[@kazriko]

I've been using 16 gig optane drives as my swap drives in Linux (even on AMD systems) for years. Only makes a difference when the systems are under memory pressure though. I'm somewhat tempted to buy a bunch of 118 gig optanes and use those as my swap partitions instead. Figured it would be better to flood an optane drive with writes than to do the same with a nand flash.

[@acasccseea4434]

they aren't availble anymore

[@HVDynamo]

@@acasccseea4434 Yeah, I just watched this video now just a day later and I already can't get either the 58GB or 118GB. I was going to get one and use it as a cache drive in Unraid and for my Plex Docker that just loves to constantly write to it for some reason. I like the fact that write durability is basically infinite whereas now I keep monitoring my M.2 SSD to make sure it's still ok.

[@Level1Techs]

Do auto notify. A large number are on the way back on stock. Large. Number.

[@bamcorpgaming5954]

Just ordered the 118 gb version. Hoping to use it as a general cache just to speed up everyday usage/loading times. I have a sabrent rocket 4 as my main drive, and am going to grab a few 18tb exos drives and start a Plex/jellyfin server as well.

[@Slavolko]

Did it make a difference for you?

[@bamcorpgaming5954]

@@Slavolko not particularly lol. i have a pretty fast pc. still neat though

[@vincentbrandon7236]

Optane drives will the the used HGST enterprise drives of the future NAS person. Too bad I already rebuilt my NAS in a MiniX last year :(

[@kurousagi1339]

Lmao. I was just ordering rn when it suddenly said it was completely out-of-stock (no more back order). Was pretty bummed out until I refreshed the page again.. It changed into “In Stock”.

[@mephistovonfaust]

Seems like the German market hasn't heard of the fire sales yet. They still charge 700€ for the 112GB version...

[@andrewlong7578]

Craft Computing has talked about the Sun F80 which is 4x200gb SSDs on a pcie card. Sounds like it could be nice for a ZFS Metadata Special Device.

[@Deleteyourself83]

They're nowhere near the speed of optane, in fact, they're that old they beat a hard drive but not by a crazy amount. The Endurance on them is insane though. Really good for a download drive, scratch drive, server boot drive etc. Look at the iodrive's & iodrive's. They're newer versions of sun drive with same technology just under a different brand name

[@andrewlong7578]

@@Deleteyourself83 Each drive yes but as a whole in raid 10 it's still significantly faster than a mechanical drive at $50 total instead of more than that per drive.

[@RindosRides]

Nice, picked up one for scratch space for my media server.

[@IAmPattycakes]

A note about slog and optane, don't bother with the 32/64gb m.2 optane drives. You can wear those out easy. Our home server killed one of those in 2 years.

[@supercompooper]

I wanna give you a hug..my newegg shipping cart is full.

[@harrythehandyman]

OOS after 1 hour LOL. I have a question: would I be better off to 1) get 3 x 1TB gen 4 TLC-NAND nvme for special metadata device to allow more small files stored on them, verse 2) 3 x 118GB Optane that has only space to store metadata for home lab use case.

[@joesalyers]

Can we just take a moment to enjoy the sweet, sweet meme of a thumbnail for this video!! Wendell has his thumbnail game on point!!

[@foxale08]

I use the 16GB optane modules as boot drives for firewalls (pfsense.) The H20 would work in theory in an AMD system if you could bifurcate the nvme 4x slot into 2x2.

[@thumbwarriordx]

Metadata special device makes my hard drive array searchable over samba full stop. It is the only thing that allows this. Also shoving small blocks into the zfs special device means I have circumvented the biggest downside of these SMR drives I bought.

[@blendingsentinel4797]

If you want to make the town screens in the back look more realistic try getting a shot of each part in two Pictures and full-screen each side accordingly

[@robbymoeyaert7482]

I use a couple of Optane 900p 240GB as L2ARC and SLOG, but not one per type. I use both at the same time. On each Optane SSD I made a 20 GB and 60 GB partition. The 2 20 GB partitions are set up as a SLOG mirror, and the 2 60 GB partitions are set up as a L2ARC. So I have a "safe" 20GB SLOG, and 120 GB L2ARC (following the make your L2ARC double your RAM size, rule of thumb) It's a bit unconventional, and on TrueNAS it requires using the command line to set it up, but it works really well for me, so far. And yes I probably should have made the SLOG partitions 60 GB as well, but as you said, it only needs to store like 5 seconds of data, and my HomeLAB can't push that much data to my NAS anyway.

[@techluvin7691]

The 16 and 32 gb optane you can use as scratch drives. I keep my downloads on mine rather then on my main drive.

[@bambinone]

I have two P1600X 58GB drives in my ZFS server and contrary to what you state in this video I can confirm that they're Gen3 x4: LnkSta: Speed 8GT/s (ok), Width x4 (ok) Intel's spec sheet backs this up. What did you see that led you to believe they only have a Gen3 x2 interface?

[@guy_autordie]

Oh, I just get why I see only 50MB/s on my SSDs most of the time. Thanks game devs!

[@jierenzheng7670]

Sad to see Optane go frankly. Was hoping to see something more from it.

[@justinchampion5468]

Am i the only one taken aback by the appearance of the zombie portraits of the golden girls in the 45 drives chassis segment? LMAO! - Noyce. So. Much. Win.

[@matjam421]

I'm using a 250gb Samsung 980 Pro NVMe drive for cache in my ZFS array. Would optane be a better solution?

[@andrewlong7578]

Possible use case for small octane drives is as a boot disk in something like a pfsense box.

[@johnwalshaw]

Thank you for the tip on the Optane sale. What are your thoughts about using on a Proxmox ceph cluster for DB and WAL disk? e.g. each host with 2TB NVME OSD plus 118GB Optane for DB and WAL.

[@isghj5]

I really wish ZFS would let you have two L2 arc caches and be able to set one of them to metadata only, but it seems like that is a setting that applies to your arc caching globally? Metadata l2 arc just seems like it should be better for light/home servers, only one disk without redundancy requirement, sounds like less risk with better MB compatibility, althought it seems to exclude having a second l2 for data.

[@CycahhaCepreebha]

If your concern is wasting valuable L2 capacity on something that doesn't need to be there, you can use datasets to restrict which folders get to put all their stuff in the L2 and which only get to put their metadata there. For example pool/anime could be metadata only, because your anime collection doesn't really benefit from being cached, while pool/games and pool/home could be data+metadata, because those do benefit from the cache. If you're talking about having something like a 1TB NVME SSD as the data cache and a 16GB Optane as the metadata cache, you should probably reconsider your setup. L2ARC needs to maintain a lookup registry in RAM, sort of like a metadata of itself, and that steals capacity from your primary ARC. Adding too much L2ARC, unless your system has 64+GBs of RAM or something already, is probably going to harm performance rather than help, because the data that otherwise would be kept in super fast RAM now needs to be read from a comparatively slow SSD instead. ZFS also isn't great at NVME SSDs to begin with. It's tuned for HDD, which means rather than flooding the SSD with every request it can find, which NVME loves, it will carefully sort the list by sector and issue it a few IOPS at a time, which is great for HDD and doesn't really matter for SATA SSD, but really isn't a good way to handle NVME. You'll have a better experience just formatting your NVME SSD with XFS and using it for your root/home/game drive, running a nightly rsync to back it up to your ZFS pool.

[@kevinhaas5261]

Does anybody know the model of the Gigabyte pcie 4x m.2 card Wendall showed at timestamp 7:50?

[@katanasteel]

Finally optane that you can obtain... Could you get like 1 or 2 and use them for zfs ARC

[@ryanjofre]

I’ve bern wondering about Optane. Thanks for the cool video. 👍& Sub’d These painfully low capacities remind me of buying my first ocZ 60 gig ssd in 2009🤣

[@greenfoxes5903]

The Zombie Golden Girls are slaving away next to the test rig. Nice.

[@denvera1g1]

11:10 I got 2 of the 960GB optane 905P drives for this and 6 of the 118GB drives(only the 905Ps were bough on sale)

[@tmaker502]

Messed up thing is I bought an Optane drive before intel announced it was dead.

[@SirCrest]

Bought a pair of the U.2 960GB 905P from you linked it on Twitter. I also have two AIC 905P 960GB drives in my server. Lot of money but I got enough to last me if this is the end of 3DXpoint. Now if I could find a PCIe x4 5.0 to PCIe 16x 3.0 for not a kidney. Then I could use my X670E lanes better

[@ewenchan1239]

I would love it if you would do a video talking about why you don't recommend the Intel Optane 900P/905P devices. Thank you.

[@zeusde86]

i'd really like to hear what options for plain sata we have, for homelab-all-spinning-rust zfs-storages, especially for mini-itx-builds, where you sacrifice your only PCIe-slot rather to have either 10g-networking or an hba, depending of the mainboard, if one of the 2 are already present onboard.

[@georgebrandon7696]

Question. Why are you trying to run a large (fast) storage server, or any server for that matter, on an ITX? There's a reason why NAS and SAN are things. There's also a reason why 12+ TB spinning rust are things. The lack of SATA isn't just a problem for mini-itx. My current Z790 "eATX" motherboard only has 4. Yeah, sure it's got more than 2 PCIe x16 slots. But three of them only run at x4. (LOL) So running a bifurcation riser card/cable and utilizing a vertical "GPU" mount for two single height x4 (or x8) cards plugged into an x16 slot isn't even an option. That's the price one pays to have 4 NVMEs with a PCIe 5.0 x16 slot. Chipset limitations suck. And every board manufacture has to make compromises because of it. I can't complain, however. It's a desktop board. Not a workstation/server board. I knew this when I bought it. So my option to expand storage and make it fast? 4 12+TB enterprise drives combined with 4 relatively large NVME (or three plus Optane). OR, Scalable Xenon FTW. I'd say TR4/Sage, but this is Optane we're talking about. Threadripper need not apply.

[@jamesbutler5570]

Actually radian rms200 are on sale to. 2gb ddr3 with supercap protection.

[@primalfear83]

Those 16Gb and 32Gb Optane devices, make for great boot devices, in places where you would sometimes us a flash drive... I use as boot devices for truenas and unraid.... works super well, more reliable and faster than flash drives... those at the code of an M.2 slot...

[@CycahhaCepreebha]

That sounds like a pretty profligate use of an Optane. Why not just get a USB DOM and put one of those extra USB2 headers cluttering the motherboard to some use? 8GB DOMs are dirt cheap on Aliexpress and more than fast enough considering you're only spending a minute per boot reading from it. Once your NAS is booted up the performance impact of having the kernel and /usr on a USB2 flash drive is negligible, all the files it accesses regularly are cached in RAM anyway.

[@primalfear83]

Fair.... I happened to have access to a couple of them and didn't really have a better use for them because of the limited size.... so was meh, lets see how this goes, and worked pretty well.

[@wayland7150]

Yes but there is probably a better use for your M.2 slot. TrueNAS Core boots fine off a pair of USB sticks. I've been running mine like that for a couple of years. Use all the proper connectors for proper storage drives. Wendle is right, the 32GB Optane are too small to be a good decision.

[@snowwsquire]

i hope optane is not dead forever, it’s a great technology

[@Patrick73787]

I use two of those U.2-to-M.2 adapters to connect both my Optane 905P and Optane P5800X SSDs to my PC. The 905P came bundled with the adapter and works at its native PCIe 3.0 speed. The P5800X didn't come with an adapter, so I bought one on AliExpress which was was only certified for PCIe 3.0 but actually worked on the P5800X at its native PCIe 4.0 speed without any issue. Basically the adapter cables are simply wires while the AIC adapters need to explicitly support PCIe 3.0 or 4.0. Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's decision to kill off Optane was a very bad mistake in my opinion.

[@2intheampm512]

Damn where'd you source the P5800X

[@paulladdie1026]

Optane prices seem a lot higher on Amazon UK 😞

[@z00h]

This thumbnail on its own deserves a like and subscribe, no doubt.

[@TheSimonarne]

I use one of those 16gb as a dedicated swap drive in some of my machines got 2 for 20$ or so a year or so ago

[@steelwitness]

Something great that came out of this was that Intel relinquished its SSD division to the company the were buying SSD components from in the first place. Solidigm. Since then Solidigm has started offering some awesome priced SSD boasting impressive read/write numbers. These dont serve the same purpose as the Optane but its still awesome nonetheless. i hope Solidigm can gain traction and I will personally be trying their SSDs in my newest PC build.

[@personaldronerepair6141]

3960x Aorus Xtreme mb 1 Tb970 evo plus m.2 C: drive Gigabyte pcie m.2 quad card with 2 x 1Tb 970 Evo Plus M.2 drives for editing. ( 1 Scratch and 1 Video Source Drive). I have Primo Cahce (not in use at this time) I would love to use Optane to improve the overall use of this workstation. What configuration would you recommend for this set up. Oh yeaah...almost forgot. Windows 10 Pro os. Forgive me for not reaching out through the forum. Short on time, long on questions. Thank You!

[@Emma__Smith]

I just recently got a u.2 drive for my evga x299 ftw K and I am having post issues. I am using one of 10gtek's u.2 cables, when I plug in the supplemental sata power, the pc gets stuck at post code 06. If i unplug the supplemental power, it does not show up in disk manager.

[@TownspersonB]

Is there an equivalent setup that you could do to speed up btrfs with Optane? I set up my NAS with two HDD's in btrfs mirror/raid. If I could speed up my btrfs NAS with some cheap Optane drives, or maybe a spare SSD or two, that would be neat.

[@danielsnyder2288]

Not seeing these prices anywhere on new egg. Was that a black Friday only price

[@emancesooh]

Ordered 5 of the 118gb on this deal around a month ago 😁

[@iszotope]

So that's what they were. I've been testing a SKU for my workplance that had a bunch of these in the host servers serving 3 JBODs with 24 HDDs each.

[@MAD450r2]

The 16 and 32s if you already own is there a good use for it ? I upgraded a freinds del from that and spinning disk to m.2 kept both drives I removed

[@UrSoMeanBoss]

Sucks that theyre ending it because the low-latency tech is super cool. Does anyone know about any replacements or alternatives on the horizon?

[@georgebrandon7696]

PCIe Gen5 storage all but makes PCIe Gen3 Optane look dumb. And they aren't ending low latency stuff. Just basically getting rid of the PCIe Gen3 stuff to focus on Gen4/5 which is still around. He mentioned this in the video.

[@stalbaum]

16gb optane memory m.2s are GREAT for SBCs with a pcie 3 slot.

[@AlexSchendel]

Whoa, 11 months later and those Optane drives are even cheaper on a Black Friday sale?? Might have to snag one for my NAS! Not to mention the 905P has some even crazier deals... Maybe just snag a 905P and partition it for both a SLOG and L2ARC haha.

[@MarcelRobitaille]

2:02 did you mean too slow or too small? Shouldn't they be the same speed as the bigger capacities?

[@sinesaii]

Are Coral processors available now? I wanted to get a USB one, but they were just gone, everywhere. I can get an orange pi from AliExpress, but I thought a Coral was unobtainium.

[@mckidney1]

At least LVM got a shout out :) Even if I sense some hesitation :D

[@greggmacdonald9644]

Wendell, what about Optane in RAID, in Windows? Even though the 905P is relatively slow as a single drive, would 2 or 4 of them in RAID give you better performance (even sequential) than a high-end PCIe 4.0 NAND Flash SSD?

[@mikee9167]

they're only slow compared to pcie 4.0 when looking at very sequential loads / high queue depths. the 905p still has better sustained write performance than every pcie 4.0 nvme, and better QD1 read perf than many. Ironically one of the only flash nvmes to outperform the 905p in sustained writes is... the samsung 970pro, because it was the older type of less dense but higher performing flash, without a DRAM cache.

[@Prophes0r]

In 2020 I bought 25 of those 16GiB Optane drives for $80 shipped. They are a TON of fun. I have them as the system drive for a few of my home servers. I also snagged a 16x to 4x4 PCIe card for like $20, and I'm playing around with putting all my Proxmox and VM Swap onto it. (Sometimes you still need to swap...)

[@dreamteamdidonethingwrong2499]

If I may ask, what are you using them for on your Proxmox Server, presumably among other systems as well? I'm thinking of purchasing a few of the 128GB model Optanes perhaps as a cache for my desktop/laptop or a special vdev on my (hypothetical) storage server, but I'm curious as to what other purposes they are used for. I'm primarily interested because of the firesale happening, I don't know how long these types of sales usually last either

[@Prophes0r]

@@dreamteamdidonethingwrong2499 The 16Gb drives are just toys. I have 4 of them passed through to the TrueNAS VM hosting my my media library and I'm using them as a special metadata VDEV (From the actual article he discusses in this video). That library is filled with 500MB-4GB video files, 5kB (media server) metadata files, 100kB subtitles, and 250kB images. So it makes a LOT of sense to put all the tiny files on media with super low access times. Then again, I just snagged 4x 1TB NVMe drives that use TLC for $58 each during a flash sale, so I might move to those. My metadata VDEV has only used 1% of the Optane drive writes in 11 months, so it is probably fine. I actually like the Optane drives as a system OS drive too. Both my (slightly older) laptops use a 16GB drive with linux, and a 256GB flash drive as their bulk storage. 2(or 4) of those 110GB Optane drives would make a great mirror setup for a proxmox server, if you are good about keeping your stuff trimmed down and not just storing everything on your VMs directly. Oh! I also have some cheap USB-C 3.1 enclosures that I use a SUPER fast external drives. Even the PCIe 2.0 x2 drives will beat a modern NAND flash SSD in access times. And the random reads are close enough to not matter. The random writes are slower, but not enough to matter to me. And obviously they get beaten when doing hugely parallel sequential reads. EDIT: I just bought a 1TB 905 drive I've been lusting over for most of 2022, to use as my OS "forever drive" on my main/gaming/workstation machine. They are SO snappy as OS drives. A NAND flash drive will have ~0.5-1.0 microsecond access latency. An Optane drive will have ~0.02-0.08 microsecond access latency. That is an order of magnitude faster. This is why Wendel had to script the opening of programs when he did that test in an earlier video. By the time he was clicking on the 4th program to open, the first 2 were already fully loaded, so he couldn't time it. In the end, he opened a bunch of different programs all at once and it only took a few seconds. Less time than a flash based drive took to open JUST Office.

[@Prophes0r]

@D M Windows 3? Sorry I don't get it. I even went back through my posts to see if I'd mistyped something. I genuinely don't know what you meant.

[@timramich]

I am on this thread where it shows how to list the number of files by size. I don't run ZFS yet, but I want to when I get new drives. How do I know how large of Optane drives I'd need? I would not be using the special_small_blocks feature. It would just be for metadata.

[@DaTruAndi]

Trying to connect the 905P U.2 version to a notebook. Problem is, I need to connect the m.2 to u.2 cable which requires SATA power. But which voltage does it need? Does it run on 5V or 12V? And bonus question - has anybody found a standalone power supply for SATA drives? Otherwise I have to get a desktop PSU and only use the SATA ports.

[@yukwong488]

I did buy one with 25% off during black friday. It is a good stuff that last soooo long I can even show it to grandkids. So, why not.

[@bikeomatic8005]

What about gaming rig - any use of optane here?

[@solar3mpire]

540 € isn't exactly a "fire" sale...

[@seankkg]

I remember when Linus mentioned Optane in a recent video and I was like, wait, it still exists?

[@jllerk]

This is just an insanely compact beautiful masterpiece, thanks for this great advice!!

[@jllerk]

Yes you see this right. I replied Trice!

[@scottstamm7022]

Is SSD/NVME caching worth while, if you're a home user w/ a dedicated Hardware RAID controller that has 512MB/1GB onboard RAID caching?

[@wayland7150]

Yeah, not worth it. The problem with normal NAND flash is that when it's writing hard it gets really slow. This is true when it's storing stuff for reading too. This can actually make a fast array run slower than without it. The reason NAND flash devices are fast is they have caching of their own, when this is saturated they are actually quite slow. The on board caching of your card sounds much better. The operating system also does some RAM caching with whatever RAM is not in use. Adding more RAM to your system helps even if technically it has enough, the excess becomes cache.

[@michaeltodd2012]

Was a fan until my 3 year old HP Desktop with 16gb Optane died. I mean the Optane chip died. And I never figured out how to disable it or get the system to boot. Luckily, I was able to get a backup of my 1TB drive. Now I'm running off a Mini Desktop with a 4 core Intel M5105 with 16gb Ram and 500gb boot drive. And it works well.

[@AaronHuffmanPerson]

Do the optane U 2 ssd drives require an Intel processor of a certain spec?

[@gagnon124]

well they do not seem to be on sale in canada