Intel optane memory modules in spite of
their tiny capacity these things do a great job of accelerating anything from
a boot hard drive to even something like a steam game drive only one small
problem Intel only officially supports
optane on its own platforms and even then only
the latest ones but
did you know that AMD has a competing
solution called store mi storm i aims to do the same thing as
optane caching but with the added flexibility of using any SSD you want
like this one or this one or
this one so naturally we wondered what happens
when you try and run Intel designed
optane memory modules in a competing platform
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as usual Intel's and AMD's approaches to the problem of tiered storage have a lot
in common so both take the hassle of managing two separate drive letters a
smaller c drive that's faster for your os and your key programs and then a big
d drive for your games and media files
so basically you're combining these two physical devices into one virtual one
that intelligently moves the most frequently accessed data to the faster
of your drives this technology is called
tiering and it has a long history in enterprise storage
but there are also some key differences
since AMD's motherboard division doesn't have an SSD business unit breathing down
their necks to sell more more caching
modules store mi can be used with any
SSD tm as long as it's either less than 256
gigs or you artificially limit it to 256
gigs and as long as you have an x470
motherboard presumably so AMD can absorb the licensing cost of the third-party
fuse drive software AMD's smaller software development team
would be another key difference but honestly that's okay for us anyway since
we're going to be using the same octane memory module for both platforms
and this thing is only 32 gigs well
within the limit sent to my setup is pretty straightforward you pick two drives
that's the maximum in the included version you assign one to the fast tier
and the other to slow and then the program goes and does its
thing so we'll be using the exact same method as we did for optane testing in
order to evaluate it launch six games one after the other time the load times
reboot and repeat
oh what just happened
okay so the first run was slower than loading
from just a hard drive but that's normal while the caching
software learns but then the performance
on the next run not only didn't improve
it actually got worse except then when sometimes it it didn't
honestly analyzing these numbers was like doing
postmortem on like what the dog had for breakfast they're scattered all over the
place with in some cases no discernible pattern whatsoever i mean then to make
matters worse at some point uplay kicked us out for game assets violation and
when we ran steam's integrity checker tons of the files were missing like what
what happened okay it's possible we dropped the hard
drive who knows things happen around here so
we grabbed another one and then believe it or not things got
even weirder even after untearing the drive before
moving it to the other system it was not visible to the other machine
other than in the UEFI BIOS Windows couldn't see it
at all the only way for it to detect was by
brute forcing a format of the drive using paragon
then while investigating we hooked up a second drive back to the AMD test bench
tiered then untiered it dropped a couple files onto it moved that to the second
machine only to have it also not detect then we
had to brute force format that to make it accessible again and then we dumped
the steam folder onto it and upon hooking it up to the first machine we
were greeted with like a ghost of the old drive contents and then this
unexpected error preventing us from accessing it so okay so tldr
if storemi touches your drive you cannot
access it on another machine without a full format now in fairness to AMD there
is a one-liner warning when you're tearing the drives up but it's still
pretty frustrating with that behind us though we rebuilt a
new tiered drive and got to benching again
and same thing numbers all over the place and frenetic
hard drive activity tick but then other reviewers were
getting sent some eye to work so what's the pattern here
well other reviewers tested launch times
back to back as in run one app reboot
observe scaling so could that be it
actually yes so when we used the same approach we
finally got our optane module to work with storm i but even then
it took three or four runs to see the improvement and the results were nowhere
near what we expected so then we got to thinking maybe store
mi uses a more rudimentary caching algorithm that simply runs out of space
on such a small caching drive that might explain the
hard drive thrashing popping a samsung 960 pro into the machine confirmed the
theory performance improved to SSD grade by the
about the second run and then even further on the third and was right up
there with our Intel platform plus optane
so we were satisfied store am i great product actually no we were only
temporarily satisfied because the untiering process took over an hour with
a 12 terabyte drive and a 256 SSD
so store my works but it comes with a lot of limitations
unless you shell out extra money making it far from ideal and then
Intel's own solution is relatively locked down so
now what is there a better way perhaps
we scoured the LTT forum which we should totally join bt dubs and found out about
primo cash it comes with a 60-day trial
so we gave it a shot and oh
my god first of all its flexibility is head and
shoulders above the other two so you can configure control and monitor
multiple arrays you can actually mix partitions from different drives within
the same array you can set detailed options for each of your configurations
and you can even add drives to be cached into existing arrays and furthermore it
can even use part of your system memory as a super fast extra cache and it
provides monitoring of key stats like cache hits and usage
second of all it's non-destructive that means that what primocash seems to
be doing is copying files to the cache
rather than moving them that means that uncaching is a matter of
a few clicks and a few seconds of waiting since you don't have to sit
there while the files re-copy from your fast storage back onto your freaking
slow storage and then finally there's the performance
not only did it manage to be on par with the other two solutions it also made an
optane cache on AMD sing the song that store mi
couldn't unfortunately taking our best case scenario on primocash and topping
it up with eight gigs of our system RAM that we had to spare didn't make a
noticeable difference to our testing but we're still really impressed
so there you have it all three solutions can achieve similar
performance so optane works really well
with platform lockdown limitations
storm i works well with some headaches
not to mention platform lockdown limitations or
that cheddar and primo cash works on
everything with everything with no side effects that we observed
but does cost 30 for a license after the
first 60 days with that said you could just buy a
cheaper board instead of an x470 and then just spend that 30 bucks on a
license yeah like why not do that
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we'll have like whatever i have optane modules down there the primo cash
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