We Ran INTEL Optane on an AMD CPU!!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
1,658 words · ~8 min read
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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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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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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