PC_Tech_Authority_July_2017

COMPONENTS REVIEWS
a criss-cross lattice above and below a
bulk material, with the top wires of the
first layer acting as the bottom wires of
the second layer. Increasing capacity can
simply mean adding more layers on top.
The advantage of this criss-cross
wiring pattern is that is allows bit
level access. Activate a wire and the
associated cross wire above or below
to access a single bit of storage. It’s that
simple. This is why Xpoint is proving
to be more than just mass
storage. The simplicity of this
design means the controller
has far less work to do, greatly
reducing response times. With
no transistors required per cell
Xpoint has roughly four times
the density of DRAM, and due to the
bit level access, write amplification is
not an issue and is part of the reason
why Xpoint has endurance ratings
some threefold that of NAND at the
same capacity. All this means Xpoint
sits between DRAM and NAND in
performance and effectively creates a
new tier of storage/memory.
OPTANE, INTEL’S FIRST XPOINT
PRODUCTS
Micron will be bringing Xpoint products
to market soon too but Intel is the
first from the partnership to release
a product line dubbed Optane using
this new technology. There’s only three
products currently; the 375GB Optane
DC P4800X PCIE card which is aimed
solely at big data centres, and two
Optane Memory products of 16GB and
32GB capacities in the M.2 form factor
using two PCIE 3.0 lanes.
Intel isn’t letting tech reviewers get
their hands on the P4800X yet, so we’ll
make do with the consumer grade
Optane Memory 32GB.
OPTANE MEMORY
Much like NAND SSDs in the early years
when capacities were too small to
be effectively used as a drive on their
own, Optane Memory is likewise being
marketed as drive caching devices to
speed up hard drive usage. This didn’t
“ Optane effectively creates a
new tier of storage/memory
performance”
stop us running tests on the Optane
Memory which when not configured as
cache still shows as a normal storage
device, to see what the underlying Xpoint
technology is capable of on its own.
Unfortunately, Optane Memory
caching currently only works with the
latest 200 series Intel motherboards
paired with a 7th gen Core processor. We
also had to update our test lab system’s
BIOS to support Optane. On top of
that the caching only works with the
operating system drive, there’s no ability
to choose which drive it caches.
Setting up Optane Memory as a cache
takes a little while but isn’t difficult.
First make sure your OS drive is in AHCI
mode, boot into Windows and install the
Optane driver. The system restarts, sets
the motherboard storage controller into
a special Intel RST with Optane mode,
then reboots into Windows. Part two
of the setup formats the Optane drive
ready for use, then reboots again. Before
hitting the Windows welcome screen
again Optane shows an enablement
process (doesn’t happen with the
smaller 16GB version). When that’s done
you’re back to the desktop and ready to
get going.
Once activated we started to feel the
caching influence. The Optane cache
requires something to be run or accessed
at least once to train it and start
caching, so after launching programs or
Windows a couple of times the
speedup became noticeable.
The Seagate 10TB hard drive we
paired Optane with exhibited
noticeably less disk thrashing
when booting into Windows
or loading a program. Not SSD
levels of performance but the HDD was
clearly getting a helping hand.
RESULTS
The start-up times graph shows what to
expect when Optane Memory is paired
with a hard drive. Windows booted 22%
quicker, and with Anti-Virus and other
services loading up in the background
after that, Steam wound up auto
launching some 28% faster too. Firefox
with one hundred tabs open took the
same amount of time to load the initial
webpage on start (likely CPU limited)
but waiting for Firefox to stop accessing
the disk afterwards reduced by 14%.
File access and game load times were
impressively reduced too, with Ashes of
the Singularity loading 44% quicker and
waiting for Photoshop to start and load
a 120MB 3D file was reduced by a most
impressive 65%.
Optane Memory caching clearly works
well!
At this stage Optane is being sold as a cache that sits between RAM and a HDD or SSD
www.pcandtechauthority.com.au July 2017 51