MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
Quote:
Represents $50 extra value, says the PC hardware maker.
Read more.
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
The B250M boards included are quite cheap (£60-70), so this looks like a very tasty offer for a budget system (as long as you aren't hoping to use one of the hyperthreading pentiums)
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
To me, as it is right now, optane is a near to useless gimmick.
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
I like the idea of Optane and wish they would bring it to Series 6 (Skylake / Z170) as I have one and would buy it if it would work. It's cheap for what it is, and I well remember the benefits of extra cache from upgrading from 4mb to 8mb in DOS on my 486. lol
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
So, Optane is the SSD bit of a Hybrid SSD+Hard drive combo ?
They should have had it as Onboard RAM instead
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
Quote:
Originally Posted by
GinoLatino
To me, as it is right now, optane is a near to useless gimmick.
I'm going to assume you haven't seen any of the benchmarks yet then.
Although I'll admit it could be better for gamers, but that seems to be a storage size problem rather than a 'what it does' problem.
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
Quote:
Originally Posted by
HW90
I'm going to assume you haven't seen any of the benchmarks yet then.
Although I'll admit it could be better for gamers, but that seems to be a storage size problem rather than a 'what it does' problem.
Looking at the benchmarks, it's not really worth it other than as a neat freebie. It massively improves on a standard hard drive, but no-one sensible with a core processor uses those anymore - the performance improvements over an SSD are not noticeable. As has been repeated many times, including the £50 premium that intel charges for a core badge (going from the G4560 to the i3 7100 gets you .4GHz and optane support) wipes out any cost savings for this over an SSD based solution.
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
Not bad for budget systems, with that I am one of the few who still uses SSD caching, just trying to figure the best way with ryzen as I currently use intel RST.
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
One thing I wonder about is how its durability holds up. SSDs being prone to errors in time does concern me, especially as my crucial m4 didn't hold up as long as I hoped.
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
I think it is very good bundle for a budjet gamer build. I have previously used a SSD Cache drive (32GB Sandisk Readycache) and it works wonders when combined with a 3.5" HDD. Optane sounds like it will have RAM like speeds so it should be theoretically much faster than SSD Cache. Obviously if you are buying an SSD or NVME storage then Optane sounds useless.
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Burnt_Custard
... Optane sounds like it will have RAM like speeds so it should be theoretically much faster than SSD Cache. ...
Eventually it might, but this first generation hasn't; it's much closer to SSD performance. If you're planning a build with only a spinning rust drive for storage it'll be of benefit, but anyone intending to use a reasonable SSD won't really see any benefit from current Optane solutions at all. And of course any benefit needs weighing against the fact that a 120GB m2 sata SSD is only around £50...
Optane came with a lot of hype about offering SSD cost/capacity at RAM speeds, but right now it's a lot more expensive than SSDs and a lot slower than RAM. Must try harder, C- ;)
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
Quote:
Originally Posted by
OilSheikh
So, Optane is the SSD bit of a Hybrid SSD+Hard drive combo ?
They should have had it as Onboard RAM instead
must agree- a ram drive would blow this away, i`ve been using them since the days of the amiga (and still do).
did try ssd cache with the crucial adrenaline some time back and performance and reliability were poor to say the least.
the specs say that the B250M does in fact have two m.2 slots so if you want to mix hdd and ssd i would have two m.2s in raid- that would be very fast indeed (but not as fast as ramdisk).
with boards supporting huge chunks of ram nowadays the capacities quoted here for the optanes aren`t really competitive afaics.
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Strawb77
must agree- a ram drive would blow this away ...
But an extra 16GB of DDR4 costs ~ £120 - that's more than twice the list price of a 16GB Optane drive.
The whole point of non-volatile disk caches is that they can keep the most used data fresh between boots; a RAM drive cache couldn't do that, so it would have to be retrained every time you booted your computer.
The technology Optane is based on will improve - it can theoretically produce RAM-like performance in a non-volatile medium - and IIRC there were rumours/discussion about it being made available as NVDRAM modules, which could be amazing (your computer would have instant resume even after a complete power down). Right now it's stuck in no man's land - it's not really fast enough to be worth coupling with an SSD, and it's too expensive on its own to add to a budget build that's only being equipped with a HDD (the 16GB Optane module retails for ~ £50).
Right now, getting an Optane drive free with your motherboard is probably the only way it makes sense. Yes, you need to invest in a Core i processor to make use of it, but you can then equip your "budget" PC with however much spinning rust storage you want and stop worrying about it. For the same budget you can get a 250GB SSD, a 1TB Hybrid, or a 3TB HDD. That's a huge difference in storage for the same money, and a free Optane with your mobo means you can get the largest drive and still get ~ SSD performance.
tl;dr? I wouldn't pay £50 for a 16GB Optane drive, but I might just let a free one influence my choice of motherboard if I was already planning to build an i3 machine...
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
I can understand the use of an optane drive for budget/ business systems but why even bother throwing one in on a z270? unless im mistaken you can't directly designate which hdd the optane drive will affect? please correct me if I'm wrong
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
Quote:
Originally Posted by
FRISH
One thing I wonder about is how its durability holds up. SSDs being prone to errors in time does concern me, especially as my crucial m4 didn't hold up as long as I hoped.
As a cache drive you ought to be ok if it totally fails, as any data held on it should be mirrored on the HDD
Re: MSI bundling 16GB Intel Optane drives with select motherboards
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Xlucine
Quote:
Originally Posted by
FRISH
One thing I wonder about is how its durability holds up. SSDs being prone to errors in time does concern me, especially as my crucial m4 didn't hold up as long as I hoped.
As a cache drive you ought to be ok if it totally fails, as any data held on it
should be mirrored on the HDD
That is true, though apparently the promise of increased durability for optane doesn't really apply the these products so hopefully optane improves to closer to what they promised. So I can see why people consider this more niche.
