Intel Gen 8 Required To Optane Accelerate Any Drive?

[DrGreer]

I just watched this Linux Tech Tips video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5UrtwW-zJs wherein he describes accelerating a seagate hard drive using an Intel Optane m.2 card. Near the end of the video, he says that in order to add a secondary data drive, Optane requires you to have a gen 8 Intel processor.

Some references:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000025074/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000027987/memory-and-storage.html

Question: I'm a bit confused now after looking at the intel site. Right now I'm using an m.2 drive as my primary drive. If I were to install Optane + an HDD, I wouldn't be using optane as my primary drive. Are they saying you have to have gen8 to accelerate 2 drives or are they saying you have to have it to accelerate any drive that isn't the drive you're running your OS on? Or any drive at all? On that note, I primarily run Linux. I'd only be booting into Windows if it were required to set all this up before booting back into my nix. I do believe Optane works on Linux.

So to clarify. My setup:
* 7th Gen i7.
* Samsung m.2 as my primary drive for Linux.
* Windows installed on an extra SATA.

What I'd like to do if I could:
* Install Optane to accelerate an extra HDD for extra storage. Probably would not install an OS to it if I didn't have to but if I had to, I suppose I could move my Windows install to it (meh). After all, we can access NTFS from Linux (meh)

 

[feelinfroggy777]

Sounds like for your use case you should go with the first generation optane memory. It will work with your 7th gen i7 as long as you have a 200 series motherboard. They come in 16 and 32gb sizes and can be used as a caching drive for a secondary HDD. I cant speak for Linux support, but I would be surprised if it did not work on Linux by now as Optane has been out for over a year.

Here are the first gen optane caching drives:

https://www.amazon.com/Intel-Optane-Memory-Module-MEMPEK1W032GAXT/dp/B06XSXX3NS

Here is a review of the first optane drivers:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-3d-xpoint-memory,5032-5.html