WEBVTT

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Intel optane memory modules in spite of

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their tiny capacity these things do a great job of accelerating anything from

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a boot hard drive to even something like a steam game drive only one small

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problem Intel only officially supports

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optane on its own platforms and even then only

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the latest ones but

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did you know that AMD has a competing

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solution called store mi storm i aims to do the same thing as

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optane caching but with the added flexibility of using any SSD you want

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like this one or this one or

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this one so naturally we wondered what happens

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when you try and run Intel designed

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optane memory modules in a competing platform

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origin pc's evo 15s weighs only 4.3

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pounds and features a smooth 144hz 1080p

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display along with an NVIDIA gtx 1070 max-q graphics card check out their

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latest deals by clicking the link below

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as usual Intel's and AMD's approaches to the problem of tiered storage have a lot

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in common so both take the hassle of managing two separate drive letters a

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smaller c drive that's faster for your os and your key programs and then a big

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d drive for your games and media files

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so basically you're combining these two physical devices into one virtual one

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that intelligently moves the most frequently accessed data to the faster

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of your drives this technology is called

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tiering and it has a long history in enterprise storage

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but there are also some key differences

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since AMD's motherboard division doesn't have an SSD business unit breathing down

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their necks to sell more more caching

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modules store mi can be used with any

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SSD tm as long as it's either less than 256

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gigs or you artificially limit it to 256

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gigs and as long as you have an x470

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motherboard presumably so AMD can absorb the licensing cost of the third-party

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fuse drive software AMD's smaller software development team

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would be another key difference but honestly that's okay for us anyway since

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we're going to be using the same octane memory module for both platforms

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and this thing is only 32 gigs well

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within the limit sent to my setup is pretty straightforward you pick two drives

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that's the maximum in the included version you assign one to the fast tier

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and the other to slow and then the program goes and does its

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thing so we'll be using the exact same method as we did for optane testing in

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order to evaluate it launch six games one after the other time the load times

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reboot and repeat

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oh what just happened

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okay so the first run was slower than loading

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from just a hard drive but that's normal while the caching

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software learns but then the performance

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on the next run not only didn't improve

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it actually got worse except then when sometimes it it didn't

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honestly analyzing these numbers was like doing

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postmortem on like what the dog had for breakfast they're scattered all over the

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place with in some cases no discernible pattern whatsoever i mean then to make

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matters worse at some point uplay kicked us out for game assets violation and

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when we ran steam's integrity checker tons of the files were missing like what

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what happened okay it's possible we dropped the hard

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drive who knows things happen around here so

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we grabbed another one and then believe it or not things got

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even weirder even after untearing the drive before

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moving it to the other system it was not visible to the other machine

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other than in the UEFI BIOS Windows couldn't see it

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at all the only way for it to detect was by

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brute forcing a format of the drive using paragon

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then while investigating we hooked up a second drive back to the AMD test bench

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tiered then untiered it dropped a couple files onto it moved that to the second

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machine only to have it also not detect then we

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had to brute force format that to make it accessible again and then we dumped

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the steam folder onto it and upon hooking it up to the first machine we

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were greeted with like a ghost of the old drive contents and then this

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unexpected error preventing us from accessing it so okay so tldr

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if storemi touches your drive you cannot

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access it on another machine without a full format now in fairness to AMD there

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is a one-liner warning when you're tearing the drives up but it's still

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pretty frustrating with that behind us though we rebuilt a

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new tiered drive and got to benching again

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and same thing numbers all over the place and frenetic

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hard drive activity tick but then other reviewers were

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getting sent some eye to work so what's the pattern here

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well other reviewers tested launch times

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back to back as in run one app reboot

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observe scaling so could that be it

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actually yes so when we used the same approach we

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finally got our optane module to work with storm i but even then

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it took three or four runs to see the improvement and the results were nowhere

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near what we expected so then we got to thinking maybe store

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mi uses a more rudimentary caching algorithm that simply runs out of space

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on such a small caching drive that might explain the

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hard drive thrashing popping a samsung 960 pro into the machine confirmed the

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theory performance improved to SSD grade by the

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about the second run and then even further on the third and was right up

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there with our Intel platform plus optane

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so we were satisfied store am i great product actually no we were only

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temporarily satisfied because the untiering process took over an hour with

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a 12 terabyte drive and a 256 SSD

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so store my works but it comes with a lot of limitations

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unless you shell out extra money making it far from ideal and then

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Intel's own solution is relatively locked down so

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now what is there a better way perhaps

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we scoured the LTT forum which we should totally join bt dubs and found out about

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primo cash it comes with a 60-day trial

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so we gave it a shot and oh

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my god first of all its flexibility is head and

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shoulders above the other two so you can configure control and monitor

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multiple arrays you can actually mix partitions from different drives within

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the same array you can set detailed options for each of your configurations

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and you can even add drives to be cached into existing arrays and furthermore it

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can even use part of your system memory as a super fast extra cache and it

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provides monitoring of key stats like cache hits and usage

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second of all it's non-destructive that means that what primocash seems to

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be doing is copying files to the cache

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rather than moving them that means that uncaching is a matter of

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a few clicks and a few seconds of waiting since you don't have to sit

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there while the files re-copy from your fast storage back onto your freaking

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slow storage and then finally there's the performance

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not only did it manage to be on par with the other two solutions it also made an

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optane cache on AMD sing the song that store mi

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couldn't unfortunately taking our best case scenario on primocash and topping

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it up with eight gigs of our system RAM that we had to spare didn't make a

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noticeable difference to our testing but we're still really impressed

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so there you have it all three solutions can achieve similar

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performance so optane works really well

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with platform lockdown limitations

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storm i works well with some headaches

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not to mention platform lockdown limitations or

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that cheddar and primo cash works on

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everything with everything with no side effects that we observed

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but does cost 30 for a license after the

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first 60 days with that said you could just buy a

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cheaper board instead of an x470 and then just spend that 30 bucks on a

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license yeah like why not do that

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there's your conclusion skillshare is an online learning

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community with thousands of classes in design business technology and more and

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premium membership gives you unlimited access to high quality classes on

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must-know topics so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do

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the work you love one of our editors taryn has been using skillshare a ton

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he's done courses on logo designs mastering adobe illustrator and he's

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currently working through duncan rogoff's mastering adobe after effects

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course skillshare is also more affordable than most learning platforms

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out there an annual subscription is less than ten dollars a month so go check it

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out because since skillshare is sponsoring this video the first 500 of

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you to use the promo link in the description will get their first two

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months for nothing go go go go go

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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get

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subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description

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we'll have like whatever i have optane modules down there the primo cash

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software maybe some big fat hard drives also down there is our merch store which

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has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which

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i would say occasionally but it happens more often than you'd think teaches us

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as much as we teach them thanks for the tip on primocash you guys yell rock