Optane with HDD or SSD with HDD

[sezbicki]

I'm new to this whole computer thing so excuse me if something does not make sense but I have been doing a lot of research. I can't seem to find an answer to one question if an answer even exists. Is it better to have a hard drive with Intel Optane or a like NVME or to have an an SSD as the boot drive and hdd as the data drive? Hypothetically, would it work if I had the HDD with an NVME as a data drive and the SSD as a primary?

 

[kanewolf]

The cost of Optane, is not currently worth it IMO. $80 for 32GB of cache. Add that $80 to the cost of the 250GB SSD you were going to buy and double the space.

 

[sezbicki]

The cost of Optane, is not currently worth it IMO. $80 for 32GB of cache. Add that $80 to the cost of the 250GB SSD you were going to buy and double the space.

awesome, thank you!

 

[Johan Kryger Haglert]

For Optane at-least officially you can only use it for the boot drive. And maybe just SATA drives at that, at-least they only recommend it with SATA drives.
So NVMe SSD + Optane = No.

SATA SSD + Optane as boot drive and then whatever else elsewhere you may not want to do either, likely very little benefit and you could get an NVMe SSD directly instead.

HDD + Optane is where it make sense to use. But most people suggest to go SSD instead likely because that's always and consistently fast wheres Optane HDD + Optane will be fast at some cases and slow at some others. The advantage of the combination though is of course that if you combine it with like 2-4 TB of HDD while not everything will be fast it will adapt and what you use often may become pretty fast and you're saving a lot of money relative 2-4 TB of SSD. You can of course use Optane + HDD and then have a secondary drive which is an SSD which you put whatever you always want to have quick access from on too.

When you say "would it work if I had the HDD with an NVME as a data drive and the SSD as a primary" I don't know if the NVMe part is the Optane drive or an NVMe drive and if Optane was any part of that whatsoever. Optane officially doesn't support anything but the boot drive so Optane wouldn't be useful there. I don't know whatever you could boot Windows from SSD and then use Intel SRT or whatever it's called (the smart rapid whatever technology thing they call it) to configure/link up the SSD and the HDD even though it's a secondary drive.