NVME Boot Drive with Intel Optane Accelerated Hard Drive

[scottgfirth65]

Hi everyone I am Just wondering if its possible to use a NVME boot Drive like the 970 Evo, and also use a 64 Gigabyte Intel Optane Module to accelerate a 6 Terabyte Wd black Drive use for a Mass Storage drive. Planning to upgrade my pc soon I know I would need a 300 series chipset or better plus a 8th gen Intel CPU would appreciate some feedback on this issue

 

[Jsimenhoff]

You certainly can do that if you have enough slots on your motherboard. You need to make sure you have two M.2 Slots on the motherboard. Many motherboards like this Gigabyte Z370 Board have an M.2 Slot and an additional "Optane Ready" slot.

The caveat here is that you may not see the performance boost you are looking for. At 64 GB, the Optane module you mentioned will only be able to cache at most 64 gigabytes of data, the equivalent of 1 - 5 games. My understanding is that Optane only caches the most used data (as determined by a proprietary software algorithm). I was initially looking into a set up like this, but thought the performance gains on 64 - 100gb of data was not worth the price of the Optane module.

Would love to hear other opinions from the community. It's still difficult to ascertain the raw performance increase resulting from Optane caching.

 

[st4rburst]

Money wise you would likely get better gains going up a size or two of nvme boot drive than dropping on an optane module....

The WD black are already pretty fast by hard drive standards.

The testing I have seen showed that optane is best suited for speeding up old slow hard drives, but its platform requirements made it unlikely to exist in an environment where the performance gains would be value for money as of yet.

TL;DR. Unless you are trying to run an old 5k or 7k rpm HDD from 4 years or more back in a brand new PC you see better performance gains per dollar from increasing SSD storage capacity than buying into optane.