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when it launched in 2017 optane memory

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this little module here was positioned as enabling SSD-like performance on a

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hard drive but only for a boot drive a significant

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limitation because the supported motherboards were so new that it was

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likely they'd already be running an SSD for their os anyway so the technology

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worked well but the value proposition

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for enthusiasts like me in particular was a little tough to find which is why

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when Intel reached out about doing a sponsored video on optane we said

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sorry we're legitimately hashtag out of ideas unless you guys could add support

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for accelerating like a secondary game drive or something well funny story they

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did it so we made a lightning fast 12 terabyte

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steam drive on the cheap

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all right so for the uninitiated 3d crosspoint is a non-volatile memory

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technology jointly developed by Intel and micron what makes it different from

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the nand flash that you'd find in a typical SSD is its much higher endurance

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that is how many times you can write to it and it's much lower latency with a

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price that's comfortably in between RAM and nand flash so the idea here is that

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even though our 32 Gigabyte module is

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only point two percent

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of the capacity of our 12 terabyte drive

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here its read speeds and in particular

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its access latency should give even a

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really large storage drive like this SSD

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like performance because the files that need to get accessed all the time aren't

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actually that big so as a baseline then

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we're gonna start by testing game loading times off of two standalone

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drives a hard drive and a high capacity

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SSD

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in this corner we've got seagate's

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barracuda pro 12 terabyte hard drive boasting a sustained

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transfer rate of 250 megabytes per second and a humongous 256 megabyte cash

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man that's like the same amount of RAM as my first pc

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and in the opposite corner we've got the 3.84

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terabyte pm863assd

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coming straight out of samsung with vnandflash up to 520 megabytes per

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second sequential reads and four gigabytes of cash it doesn't have the

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best dollar per gig ratio but this is a

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battle of the heavyweights

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yeah yeah okay sorry i'll stop this shtick now

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before starting our tests we picked a handful of games that would be

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impractical to store on a dedicated SSD

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unless you're a mega baller gta 5 fallout 4 witcher 3 and deus ex they all

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take up a ton of space then we maxed out the in-game graphics settings and loaded

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a pre-leveled save game with a few dozen mods loaded into skyrim to simulate a

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more realistic scenario for anyone who's still playing skyrim we used assassin's

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creed origins discovery mode load times and the first level of the campaign in

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for honor each set was run three times with reboots in between we also did

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three back-to-back sets with the hard drive without rebooting to see what

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effect its huge cash would have

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so we didn't see anything unexpected overall

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but what was cool was that the large cash built right into this drive does seem to

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have an effect on its loading times in some of the titles as long as the system

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doesn't get rebooted in between this could be a really good sign for our

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opt-in accelerated drive because unlike a cache built into the drive the data

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stays on it in between boots

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and with the exception of witcher 3 and

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for honor the load times of our combined solution tanked below that of a bare

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hard drive but there's nothing unexpected here like accelerating a boot

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drive it's the nature of the caching beast that before it's had a chance to

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analyze the data it'll perform the same

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or maybe even worse so

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let's give this a reboot and do it again

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interesting so as it turns out it only

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took a second run for our hard drive

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optane combo to drop its loading times

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in every title except for witcher 3 to

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the same or faster levels than a regular

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SSD so we are actually going to have to reboot one more time and see if this

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continues during our third run the already impressive results

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stayed about the same with assassin's creed dropping below SSD level load

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times and then even gta 5 showing a

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slight improvement so this is really cool we can see a couple

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of things at play here so first of all the cache is working

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second it does work across reboots and

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third there is a big advantage to running it like this over even just

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having a bigger dram cache on your hard drive because it's so big it can hold

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enough data to cache multiple modern titles so even if you're not the

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kind of person who just plays the same couple of games over and over you can

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still benefit from it but will every gamer benefit

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so we did a few more runs with reboots in between in order to find out and we

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found some interesting things here some games continue to improve and actually

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widen their gap from a dedicated SSD while some games don't scale at all so

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how about the value proposition then well while your typical SATA SSD from a

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reputable brand comes in at about 300

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per terabyte a combination of a seagate hard drive and an optane module comes

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down to as low as 38 dollars per terabyte for legit SSD grade performance

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at least in all of the tests that we ran this is somewhat offset by the fact that

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accelerating a second drive requires an

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8th gen Intel core processor and 300

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series chipset as opposed to 7th gen and 200 series for primary drive

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acceleration but it is something for anyone who is running that platform to

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keep in mind so thanks Intel for allowing data drive caching now i can go

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back to the satisfying sound of hard drive clickety clicks without giving up

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speed this is something that i have been asking for since optane launched i even

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asked about it when i attended the pre-launch briefing because it makes so

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much more sense for enthusiasts because for your os you can buy a full-blown SSD

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or if you're that hardcore and obtain 900p and run the whole thing in octane

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rather than using caching but it's just not cost effective for a game drive

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where you can easily have multiple terabytes of files that you only access

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once in a while or in some cases never

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humble bundle sorry excuse me it's also worth noting that aside from

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games file search times improved though with that said i'm not sure if i would

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get one of our writers to use my photo library as a test case for this next

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time around so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you know what to do

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but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in

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the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts

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like this one i'm not sure if this one will still be there it's limited edition but um

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also linked in the video description is our community forum which you should totally join