Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, morphine, Steel
Igor_Kavinski wrote:Why go with flash at all? Get Optane 16GB. Pretty cheap, way faster and works as a storage device in an M2 slot regardless of whether you have AMD or Intel platform.
Igor_Kavinski wrote:https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/b1j8v6/using_optane_as_a_windows_page_file/
https://hardforum.com/threads/16gb-opta ... g.1959689/
Those two folks aren't displeased with their Optane purchases. However, the 16GB Optane has a pretty low sequential write speed. If you want something better, you might have to go for the 58GB version which is quite a bit more pricey. An NVMe SSD will deliver blazing fast write speeds but the Optane would still beat it in latency. Also, I couldn't find an NVMe SSD for $25. There's this:
https://www.amazon.com/Transcend-TS128G ... 07CXC32T2/
But it's using SLC caching so once that runs out, write speeds will become abysmal. Optane memory doesn't have the gradual slowdown with time issue when it comes to writing, AFAIK. It will deliver consistent performance till it is exhausted by the writes, which shouldn't be much in your use case since you are leaving the applications running instead of launching them from scratch everytime.
Q: Optane does not need the UNMAP command. Does that mean there is no internal garbage collection? If I continuously rewrite to an Optane drive, can I expect any performance degradation? Does the concept of write amplification apply on Optane? If so, under what circumstances?
A: To answer your first two questions: Intel Optane is a write-in-place media, therefore it incurs no performance penalties from garbage collection or its associated write amplification. We have defenestrated garbage collection!
roncat wrote:Optane is interesting, as Igor noted... if the swaps really are mostly 4K r/w, optane might open a can of whoop-arse on NVMe, where it can use its major IOPS advantage.
just brew it! wrote:My next build will put the swap on NVMe.
Igor_Kavinski wrote:just brew it! wrote:My next build will put the swap on NVMe.
Anything stopping you from doing that in your current build?
blastdoor wrote:Wow, guys -- it's crazy that even though this site is in a zombie-like state, I can still find better answers to questions here than anything google can cough up. Maybe I suck at the google, but I'm inclined to say that you're all awesome. Very helpful posts!
just brew it! wrote:roncat wrote:Optane is interesting, as Igor noted... if the swaps really are mostly 4K r/w, optane might open a can of whoop-arse on NVMe, where it can use its major IOPS advantage.
Well, if you want a data point, the cumulative I/O stats for the swap device on my Linux desktop indicate that the average I/O request size has been exactly 4K. That (combined with the fact that the VM page size is 4K so it "just makes sense") is enough evidence for me.
Wirko wrote:Based on what you and other guys said, the 4K size seems to be the case most of the time, or all of the time ... but it looks like poorly designed virtual memory management in OSes. Just about every storage media reaches much higher transfer rates with larger blocks. Why doesn't the VM manager somehow coalesce several small I/O requests into larger ones, both on writes and on reads? Is swap performance simply irrelevant because once you let your system do the swapping, you've given up any and all performance anyway?
Wirko wrote:... but it looks like poorly designed virtual memory management in OSes. Just about every storage media reaches much higher transfer rates with larger blocks. Why doesn't the VM manager somehow coalesce several small I/O requests into larger ones, both on writes and on reads? Is swap performance simply irrelevant because once you let your system do the swapping, you've given up any and all performance anyway?
Wirko wrote:Makes even less sense than I thought before. I'm referring to the Intel's push to market 8GB of RAM in notebooks as 24GB of memory because Optane is counted in. "24GB" Ideapads can still be found on Amazon, as well as "20GB" HPs.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/271543-pc-oems-are-selling-laptops-with-optane-cache-drives-and-claiming-its-memory