when it launched in 2017 optane memory
this little module here was positioned as enabling SSD-like performance on a
hard drive but only for a boot drive a significant
limitation because the supported motherboards were so new that it was
likely they'd already be running an SSD for their os anyway so the technology
worked well but the value proposition
for enthusiasts like me in particular was a little tough to find which is why
when Intel reached out about doing a sponsored video on optane we said
sorry we're legitimately hashtag out of ideas unless you guys could add support
for accelerating like a secondary game drive or something well funny story they
did it so we made a lightning fast 12 terabyte
steam drive on the cheap
all right so for the uninitiated 3d crosspoint is a non-volatile memory
technology jointly developed by Intel and micron what makes it different from
the nand flash that you'd find in a typical SSD is its much higher endurance
that is how many times you can write to it and it's much lower latency with a
price that's comfortably in between RAM and nand flash so the idea here is that
even though our 32 Gigabyte module is
only point two percent
of the capacity of our 12 terabyte drive
here its read speeds and in particular
its access latency should give even a
really large storage drive like this SSD
like performance because the files that need to get accessed all the time aren't
actually that big so as a baseline then
we're gonna start by testing game loading times off of two standalone
drives a hard drive and a high capacity
SSD
in this corner we've got seagate's
barracuda pro 12 terabyte hard drive boasting a sustained
transfer rate of 250 megabytes per second and a humongous 256 megabyte cash
man that's like the same amount of RAM as my first pc
and in the opposite corner we've got the 3.84
terabyte pm863assd
coming straight out of samsung with vnandflash up to 520 megabytes per
second sequential reads and four gigabytes of cash it doesn't have the
best dollar per gig ratio but this is a
battle of the heavyweights
yeah yeah okay sorry i'll stop this shtick now
before starting our tests we picked a handful of games that would be
impractical to store on a dedicated SSD
unless you're a mega baller gta 5 fallout 4 witcher 3 and deus ex they all
take up a ton of space then we maxed out the in-game graphics settings and loaded
a pre-leveled save game with a few dozen mods loaded into skyrim to simulate a
more realistic scenario for anyone who's still playing skyrim we used assassin's
creed origins discovery mode load times and the first level of the campaign in
for honor each set was run three times with reboots in between we also did
three back-to-back sets with the hard drive without rebooting to see what
effect its huge cash would have
so we didn't see anything unexpected overall
but what was cool was that the large cash built right into this drive does seem to
have an effect on its loading times in some of the titles as long as the system
doesn't get rebooted in between this could be a really good sign for our
opt-in accelerated drive because unlike a cache built into the drive the data
stays on it in between boots
and with the exception of witcher 3 and
for honor the load times of our combined solution tanked below that of a bare
hard drive but there's nothing unexpected here like accelerating a boot
drive it's the nature of the caching beast that before it's had a chance to
analyze the data it'll perform the same
or maybe even worse so
let's give this a reboot and do it again
interesting so as it turns out it only
took a second run for our hard drive
optane combo to drop its loading times
in every title except for witcher 3 to
the same or faster levels than a regular
SSD so we are actually going to have to reboot one more time and see if this
continues during our third run the already impressive results
stayed about the same with assassin's creed dropping below SSD level load
times and then even gta 5 showing a
slight improvement so this is really cool we can see a couple
of things at play here so first of all the cache is working
second it does work across reboots and
third there is a big advantage to running it like this over even just
having a bigger dram cache on your hard drive because it's so big it can hold
enough data to cache multiple modern titles so even if you're not the
kind of person who just plays the same couple of games over and over you can
still benefit from it but will every gamer benefit
so we did a few more runs with reboots in between in order to find out and we
found some interesting things here some games continue to improve and actually
widen their gap from a dedicated SSD while some games don't scale at all so
how about the value proposition then well while your typical SATA SSD from a
reputable brand comes in at about 300
per terabyte a combination of a seagate hard drive and an optane module comes
down to as low as 38 dollars per terabyte for legit SSD grade performance
at least in all of the tests that we ran this is somewhat offset by the fact that
accelerating a second drive requires an
8th gen Intel core processor and 300
series chipset as opposed to 7th gen and 200 series for primary drive
acceleration but it is something for anyone who is running that platform to
keep in mind so thanks Intel for allowing data drive caching now i can go
back to the satisfying sound of hard drive clickety clicks without giving up
speed this is something that i have been asking for since optane launched i even
asked about it when i attended the pre-launch briefing because it makes so
much more sense for enthusiasts because for your os you can buy a full-blown SSD
or if you're that hardcore and obtain 900p and run the whole thing in octane
rather than using caching but it's just not cost effective for a game drive
where you can easily have multiple terabytes of files that you only access
once in a while or in some cases never
humble bundle sorry excuse me it's also worth noting that aside from
games file search times improved though with that said i'm not sure if i would
get one of our writers to use my photo library as a test case for this next
time around so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you know what to do
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the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts
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