If this is "backordered" on newegg, your order will be filled, order anyway. its fine :D I was going to release this when they restocked but forgot till after it was live. oops!
Well @Level1Techs NAS Caching -> how much faster is 32GB Optane (if you can not buy bigger ones in your region) compared to a M.2 NVMW cache? The other advantage of no need to rebuild the cache aside. Cheers and have a nice time till Christmas Pepe
Aaaaand you blew up the Optane market. Newegg is "Sold Out" now. Not "Backordered". Ebay has been swept clean of all the reasonably priced ones. I'm SOOO glad I bit the bullet 2 days ago and bought that 960GB 905 drive I've been drooling over for the last month. The prices are back up in unreasonabletown.
intel heavily hindered Optame's growth among personal consumers with their proprietary key requirements to unlock optane for raid use. That was both expensive and not sold for individual use.
Yeah. I have a laptop that came with an H20 - But as a Linux user, I had to disable the Optane side of things to enable dual-booting. Optane failed because Intel intentionally pigeonholed it into a limited-use niche.
@@Entropy512 I dunno, I think Intel was looking for ways to parcel out something that was non competitive from a business standpoint in way that could at least come close to breaking even. I was at thr earliest Optane briefings and the use case scenarios were pretty hard to ever justify for consumers PCs unfortunately.
At this point your only option is to stack dram cache and NVMe drives. It also really didn't help that it was marketed for gaming in a time when most games were still designed to be loaded from an optical drive.
Nah. What hindered (and still hinders) their growth is a bunch of gamer bois who think loading up their big ram disk is a better option than Optane because it's cheaper. Lol Don't believe me? Look at some of the idiot comments. Probably the same ones who whine that NVIDIA cards are overpriced for what gaming experience they give. Yet the AMD cards they cite can't do what I do with NVIDIA GPUs (AI/ML/Data Science). AMD has a very small niche in that "enterprise use" market, but AI/ML/Data Science isn't one of them.
Note: The green PCIe x8-to-2xU.2 bifurcation adapter Wendell has been using is likely the same design as the Delock 90091 that is also rated for PCIe Gen4. Also available as a PCIe x16-to-4xU.2 variant with the model name 90092.
Sometimes I might be far ahead but I still see time as a loop so I’d consider myself pretty retarded if I posted something like “first” ;) I try to only post something with objective content or deeply sarcastic shorts to vent frustration about stuff.
Do I have the thinking correct....if your bios does not support pcie bifurcation you can get around this by getting the 16x card with the pci switch integrated in the card? I am running an old 4770k machine as a server for nextcloud/plex. I doubt the motherboard supports the bifurcation.
@@nathanleopold8972 Yes but cards with a PCIe switch come with a hefty price premium (and more power draw) so it might be worth checking if selling an old platform to migrate to something a bit newer yet still used might make more sense.
@@timramich Oh, probably related to Micron's involvement with the tech. That's extremely disappointing. Tech being held back by law. Something should be done about this.
@@marcopolo8584 Search for an article called "There Is Nothing Wrong With Optane And 3D Xpoint." It's both Intel and Micron who aren't allowed to use the tech now.
I've used an optane for dev git usage for years now, and i recently updated my workstation. However, in plain normal daily use it's still twice as fast as some of the fastest modern ssds. RIP, optane, you will be missed...
ZFS caches everything in RAM given the opportunity. RAM is a much faster cache and the size available these days should be plenty. The Meta Data storage does sound exciting however you need at least two Optanes because they are critical to your stored data. They also must be big enough. I think I will stick to RAM as cache because when I tried normal SSD as cache it actually slowed down a lot for large writes such as virtual hard drive files. An array of 4 drives is actually quite fast.
I tried doing the "find . | wc" not knowing that I had enough ram for zfs to have a copy of the metadata in ram or atleast thats what im assuming was causing it to return in 1.356 seconds with 117265 files. This is against a raidz3 of 12 1tb spinning disks.
Whatever is in RAM doesn't survive reboot. That's the whole point in PERSISTENT storage. It's there when you need it. Don't have to wait for it to load up the RAM every time you have to reboot. And if you're running SQ, RAPIDS, or anything else which loads into RAM? Does you motherboard support more than 128GB? Because all that stuff in RAM adds up quickly. I don't have time to sit here and wait for that rust to be loaded into RAM., When I need it, I need it. Persistent storage is a thing for a reason. There's a reason why Windows and Linux doesn't just load itself up all in ram. (You can do that with Apline, however. :) )
@@georgebrandon7696 Between having ram and a normal SSD, you get all the benefit without paying for overpriced Optane. Optane is great but you can get a boatload of RAM and a normal SSD for less.
@@BandanazX what benefit is that? Having to wait until the data is read into ram, then lost during reboot? Persistent memory is a thing for a reason. If you don't understand why, then STFU. Also, sure, DDR4 is cheap as dirt. DDR5, and ECC DDR5 is not. And it won't be until years AFTER DDR6 hits CPUs and motherboards.
I've liked the Optane technology, but it's just too darned expensive. I have a 16GB drive that I use for the temp folder on my main machine. It does speed up installations quite a bit, and takes a small load off my main drive.
@@chounoki Not enough RAM for a RAM disk big enough for a temp folder. Many installers and updaters use the temp folder and need 8GB or more of space. Even with that 16GB Optane drive, I run into issues sometimes and have to temporarily change my temp variable to get them to run.
Too expensive is a relative term. How expensive is it to keep replacing NVME drives that wear out much faster than an enterprise-grade NVME? 20 years from now, you still have the same Optane device. You might have gone through 4 regular NVMEs. And this isn't just about replacem4nt costs either. You then have downtime to change those NVMEs. Time is money.
Yeah, my HP Spectre X360 13 OLED had "48GB of RAM" (16GB RAM + 32 GBOptane = "48Gb Of RaM"). It wasn't cheap, though. It was $1500. The OLED screen is great, though.
@@Jushwa I don't know about that particular model, but I remember seeing more than a few computers advertised as having "2GB + 32GB" of RAM a while back
I use the 16 and 32 gb optane as boot drives for NAS and firewall devices instead of USB devices. They work nicely and haven't had any problems yet unlike my USB boot drives.
With a fast gen4 nvme drive, I doubt there is much difference. I would rather get a gen4 nvme drive with more space that I can use for other things than an expensive Optane that's pretty much slower in every category except 4k read at queue depth of 1.
Yep. Rocking 2x Optane 280GB 900p’s. The 900p is (IMHO) at the sweet spot of affordability and performance. They’re getting a little harder to find as stocks deplete but I ended up getting new old stock from a seller in China to complete my mirrored setup.
Wendell. This is sadly one of the few times when you have to put US only in the title. Newegg UK, ships its Optane gear from the US. So shipping costs are untenable. Shipping would add 60% to the cost of the 58GB version ($82 all told). That's not far off the base price of the 118GB version. Useful info as always, Wendell.
why is it that it's so expensive to ship things to Europe? Or the United Kingdom for that matter? I mean what exactly is there that's so special that everything that is being shipped to the UK makes it so darn expensive?
Yeah, I can't find any Optane stuff anywhere here in Europe. And ordering from the US is prohibitively expensive. If a seller doesn't have a warehouse in Europe or there are resellers over here, it's often not worth it.
I just snagged a P1600X 118 GB for about 80 bucks from Amazon. The very last one I could purchase here in Germany and that's only because it's shipped from the US. I think I'm gonna make it a boot drive!
Just the thumbnail alone grants this video infinite amounts of absolutely stellar meme worthiness. Oh and this means that the video is also entitled to an _absolutely_ *INSTANT* like from me, as well! (and I haven't even begun watching the video in the first place... oh man.) What you've done with all this power is... is... *MEMEWORTHY!* You absolute *legend!* ! I mean like, if it were up to me then I say that you've hit an absolute _f-ing_ home run with this one, Wendel!! Chapeau!
Thanks for the tip. I think I'll put my page (swap) file on one of these. I'm satisfied with my ZFS performance because I don't have much going on with it, like it's not a factor when I want to watch a movie or store my disk image backups.
PrimoCache is very good when using Optane as the "L2" cache. I have 4x1TB NVME (Intel 670p) that have 512GB of Intel Persistent Memory (1st gen) in front of them and 32GB of DDR4 ECC 2666 in front of that. The whole setup gets about 18GB/sec in Crystal Disk Mark for the Seq 1M Q8T1, but 680MB/sec in RND4K Q1T1. Latency is around 5 microseconds. I can't really recommend the Intel 670p, but I wanted a full-Intel stack to avoid issues with VROC (it's RAID0, just for games so who cares if it goes up in smoke). It's a shame that prices on Optane were so high and that now it's all being tossed out like this, I would have liked to see an affordably priced solution like the H20 but maybe using 2+TB of NAND and, well, a meaningful amount of Optane for gaming-like workloads (or other desktop-class use). If this had come as a PCIe x16 card it wouldn't have been a big deal, but it probably would have worked better than having to rig up something like I have. Also, the Solidigm tool that replaced the original Intel one for the NVME stuff is slow and clunky. It's such a shame it all went the way it did, but oh well.
Am i the only one taken aback by the appearance of the zombie portraits of the golden girls in the 45 drives chassis segment? LMAO! - Noyce. So. Much. Win.
Lmao. I was just ordering rn when it suddenly said it was completely out-of-stock (no more back order). Was pretty bummed out until I refreshed the page again.. It changed into “In Stock”.
I've been using 16 gig optane drives as my swap drives in Linux (even on AMD systems) for years. Only makes a difference when the systems are under memory pressure though. I'm somewhat tempted to buy a bunch of 118 gig optanes and use those as my swap partitions instead. Figured it would be better to flood an optane drive with writes than to do the same with a nand flash.
@@acasccseea4434 Yeah, I just watched this video now just a day later and I already can't get either the 58GB or 118GB. I was going to get one and use it as a cache drive in Unraid and for my Plex Docker that just loves to constantly write to it for some reason. I like the fact that write durability is basically infinite whereas now I keep monitoring my M.2 SSD to make sure it's still ok.
OOS after 1 hour LOL. I have a question: would I be better off to 1) get 3 x 1TB gen 4 TLC-NAND nvme for special metadata device to allow more small files stored on them, verse 2) 3 x 118GB Optane that has only space to store metadata for home lab use case.
I have two P1600X 58GB drives in my ZFS server and contrary to what you state in this video I can confirm that they're Gen3 x4: LnkSta: Speed 8GT/s (ok), Width x4 (ok) Intel's spec sheet backs this up. What did you see that led you to believe they only have a Gen3 x2 interface?
Alright, so how do I get started setting this up in TrueNAS scale? I've bought 2x Optane 118gb and have them ready for mirroring and use as a Metadata drive! A little nudge in the right direction would be much appreciated 😎
I use the 16GB optane modules as boot drives for firewalls (pfsense.) The H20 would work in theory in an AMD system if you could bifurcate the nvme 4x slot into 2x2.
Metadata special device makes my hard drive array searchable over samba full stop. It is the only thing that allows this. Also shoving small blocks into the zfs special device means I have circumvented the biggest downside of these SMR drives I bought.
Those 16Gb and 32Gb Optane devices, make for great boot devices, in places where you would sometimes us a flash drive... I use as boot devices for truenas and unraid.... works super well, more reliable and faster than flash drives... those at the code of an M.2 slot...
That sounds like a pretty profligate use of an Optane. Why not just get a USB DOM and put one of those extra USB2 headers cluttering the motherboard to some use? 8GB DOMs are dirt cheap on Aliexpress and more than fast enough considering you're only spending a minute per boot reading from it. Once your NAS is booted up the performance impact of having the kernel and /usr on a USB2 flash drive is negligible, all the files it accesses regularly are cached in RAM anyway.
Fair.... I happened to have access to a couple of them and didn't really have a better use for them because of the limited size.... so was meh, lets see how this goes, and worked pretty well.
Yes but there is probably a better use for your M.2 slot. TrueNAS Core boots fine off a pair of USB sticks. I've been running mine like that for a couple of years. Use all the proper connectors for proper storage drives. Wendle is right, the 32GB Optane are too small to be a good decision.
They're nowhere near the speed of optane, in fact, they're that old they beat a hard drive but not by a crazy amount. The Endurance on them is insane though. Really good for a download drive, scratch drive, server boot drive etc. Look at the iodrive's & iodrive's. They're newer versions of sun drive with same technology just under a different brand name
@@Deleteyourself83 Each drive yes but as a whole in raid 10 it's still significantly faster than a mechanical drive at $50 total instead of more than that per drive.
Still buying all the Optanes I can get, in hope of bridging the time until a new replacement comes out that's as good as Optane. Prices will skyrocket for sure doe, as it's already difficult to get them new where I live.
Is there any way with ZFS to store the metadata on both a specialized device (like an Optane) as well as alongside the actual data? Essentially mirror the standard metadata to a specialized device for look-ups? If so, it would seem that we could get the benefits of fast look-ups with just a single Optane device without the risk of losing your metadata in the case of a failure of your specialized device.
I'd like to know this too. It seems strange that you can either go high-risk and _only_ store it on a separate device, or _only_ store it with the actual data... but you aren't able to just do both.
L2ARC does, by default store metadata, at least on Linux. You can view how much is being stored using the arc_summary command. “By default both MRU and MFU data and metadata are cached in the L2ARC.”
7:48 - 8:19 @level1techs. How do these M.2 adapters play with Dell PE Servers (R530)? I'm looking to have 4 NVMEs on one of those adapters. 2 for Truenas OS in Mirror and 2 for Meta...Helpful video btw. Thanks.
A note about slog and optane, don't bother with the 32/64gb m.2 optane drives. You can wear those out easy. Our home server killed one of those in 2 years.
I really wish ZFS would let you have two L2 arc caches and be able to set one of them to metadata only, but it seems like that is a setting that applies to your arc caching globally? Metadata l2 arc just seems like it should be better for light/home servers, only one disk without redundancy requirement, sounds like less risk with better MB compatibility, althought it seems to exclude having a second l2 for data.
If your concern is wasting valuable L2 capacity on something that doesn't need to be there, you can use datasets to restrict which folders get to put all their stuff in the L2 and which only get to put their metadata there. For example pool/anime could be metadata only, because your anime collection doesn't really benefit from being cached, while pool/games and pool/home could be data+metadata, because those do benefit from the cache. If you're talking about having something like a 1TB NVME SSD as the data cache and a 16GB Optane as the metadata cache, you should probably reconsider your setup. L2ARC needs to maintain a lookup registry in RAM, sort of like a metadata of itself, and that steals capacity from your primary ARC. Adding too much L2ARC, unless your system has 64+GBs of RAM or something already, is probably going to harm performance rather than help, because the data that otherwise would be kept in super fast RAM now needs to be read from a comparatively slow SSD instead. ZFS also isn't great at NVME SSDs to begin with. It's tuned for HDD, which means rather than flooding the SSD with every request it can find, which NVME loves, it will carefully sort the list by sector and issue it a few IOPS at a time, which is great for HDD and doesn't really matter for SATA SSD, but really isn't a good way to handle NVME. You'll have a better experience just formatting your NVME SSD with XFS and using it for your root/home/game drive, running a nightly rsync to back it up to your ZFS pool.
Yeah, not worth it. The problem with normal NAND flash is that when it's writing hard it gets really slow. This is true when it's storing stuff for reading too. This can actually make a fast array run slower than without it. The reason NAND flash devices are fast is they have caching of their own, when this is saturated they are actually quite slow. The on board caching of your card sounds much better. The operating system also does some RAM caching with whatever RAM is not in use. Adding more RAM to your system helps even if technically it has enough, the excess becomes cache.
I wonder if the reduced prices will happen in Australia... I wouldn't mind a small caching SSD since my main one is full and several games have ended up on old technology. Edit: Looks like that's going to be a nope. Hardly anything stocked, and most still at original prices.
@@Blacklands Yup... was hoping to snag some on sales but nada. So, mini box project for homeserver + pfsense router got shelved and put the money to building PCs for family members.
Something great that came out of this was that Intel relinquished its SSD division to the company the were buying SSD components from in the first place. Solidigm. Since then Solidigm has started offering some awesome priced SSD boasting impressive read/write numbers. These dont serve the same purpose as the Optane but its still awesome nonetheless. i hope Solidigm can gain traction and I will personally be trying their SSDs in my newest PC build.
If only we could get a persistent memory alternative or a caching system like ZFS' for windows, containers, databases and web servers. As it currently stands applications are either written as on disk or in memory without enough foresight that users want a something to load after startup and save at regular intervals or shutdown to disk but run/cached/operate from RAM saving changes to disk.
Waste of a M.2 slot. Might be OK on a desktop system for Windows system on a HDD as a ReadyBoost drive. I've found that ReadyBoost really does help. It does two things, it stores a file for fast booting, it assists with other MS tech for speeding up loading. The problem is the systems that benefit from ReadyBoost are usually old ones with no M.2 slot. An SSD C: drive would be much better.
Just ordered the 118 gb version. Hoping to use it as a general cache just to speed up everyday usage/loading times. I have a sabrent rocket 4 as my main drive, and am going to grab a few 18tb exos drives and start a Plex/jellyfin server as well.
Bought some 58gb Optane for $35 just now on Newegg. Gonna put it an Asus BR1100 netbook with a Jasper Lake Celeron and 4gb ram as boot drive instead of the default 64gb eMMC. The performance of the BR1100 improved significantly when so put in a cheap NVME SSD, I wonder how much better it can get if the OS and pagefile run on Optane vs regular NAND.
It is. Low latency at QD1 makes your OS snappier than any NAND device. You also don't have "glitches" when drive fills up, or garbage collector kicks in.
I just recently got a u.2 drive for my evga x299 ftw K and I am having post issues. I am using one of 10gtek's u.2 cables, when I plug in the supplemental sata power, the pc gets stuck at post code 06. If i unplug the supplemental power, it does not show up in disk manager.
Thank you for the tip on the Optane sale. What are your thoughts about using on a Proxmox ceph cluster for DB and WAL disk? e.g. each host with 2TB NVME OSD plus 118GB Optane for DB and WAL.
Can't find any 58GB or 118GB optane ssd modules in my region (outside US). But I can find optane Memory, in 256gb, 512gb ddr4 modules. Anyway these could be mounted on some pcie 3 card and used as vdev? or maybe directly on the motherboards main memory slots?
SLOG is generally a useless endeavor for home lab TrueNAS system, and they don’t need to be large, in fact most 10Gb systems only need 16-32GB max. SLOG devices need to be high endurance, non-volatile and low latency, which Optane is, but generally don’t offer performance improvement as without a SLOG device it will default to using RAM, which is faster. SLOG devices are primarily used more for data integrity purposes. TrueNAS in their enterprise offering actually uses NVDIMM for this, since it’s orders of magnitude faster than NAND from a latency perspective and essentially the closest thing you can get to RAM while being non-volatile, but the modules are only 16-32 GB even with their systems that have 100Gb networking.
Was a fan until my 3 year old HP Desktop with 16gb Optane died. I mean the Optane chip died. And I never figured out how to disable it or get the system to boot. Luckily, I was able to get a backup of my 1TB drive. Now I'm running off a Mini Desktop with a 4 core Intel M5105 with 16gb Ram and 500gb boot drive. And it works well.
What happens in case of poewer loss while let's say the data was written to SLOG but not yet to the HDDs. Does that happen? Is it the same as regular rules that apply to COW if it didn't write then it didn't and it's gone. But I'm trying to understand what is looked at here when there's a SLOG. The actual SLOG or the HDDs?
Are Coral processors available now? I wanted to get a USB one, but they were just gone, everywhere. I can get an orange pi from AliExpress, but I thought a Coral was unobtainium.
I am on this thread where it shows how to list the number of files by size. I don't run ZFS yet, but I want to when I get new drives. How do I know how large of Optane drives I'd need? I would not be using the special_small_blocks feature. It would just be for metadata.
You have to have excessive memory to replace the caching function of Optane.. Makes for great write intense applications.. so make a write intensive drive array. Still if these are needed long term, there is no substitution for SLC (100k+ writes)
Would any of this be compatible with AMD storeMI? It has easily configurable tiered storage options, but idk if it has the right features for optane since it's an Intel product.
Trying to connect the 905P U.2 version to a notebook. Problem is, I need to connect the m.2 to u.2 cable which requires SATA power. But which voltage does it need? Does it run on 5V or 12V? And bonus question - has anybody found a standalone power supply for SATA drives? Otherwise I have to get a desktop PSU and only use the SATA ports.
If this is "backordered" on newegg, your order will be filled, order anyway. its fine :D
I was going to release this when they restocked but forgot till after it was live. oops!
How much is it normally?
Out of stock internationally
Well @Level1Techs NAS Caching -> how much faster is 32GB Optane (if you can not buy bigger ones in your region) compared to a M.2 NVMW cache? The other advantage of no need to rebuild the cache aside.
Cheers and have a nice time till Christmas
Pepe
Aaaaand you blew up the Optane market.
Newegg is "Sold Out" now. Not "Backordered".
Ebay has been swept clean of all the reasonably priced ones.
I'm SOOO glad I bit the bullet 2 days ago and bought that 960GB 905 drive I've been drooling over for the last month. The prices are back up in unreasonabletown.
Would that work in a Synology for caching?
that thumbnail is legendary
Yeah soo cool right
Sad that intel kills a decent product
intel heavily hindered Optame's growth among personal consumers with their proprietary key requirements to unlock optane for raid use. That was both expensive and not sold for individual use.
Yeah. I have a laptop that came with an H20 - But as a Linux user, I had to disable the Optane side of things to enable dual-booting. Optane failed because Intel intentionally pigeonholed it into a limited-use niche.
@@Entropy512 wait what fr thats so retarded on intel’s part
@@Entropy512 I dunno, I think Intel was looking for ways to parcel out something that was non competitive from a business standpoint in way that could at least come close to breaking even. I was at thr earliest Optane briefings and the use case scenarios were pretty hard to ever justify for consumers PCs unfortunately.
At this point your only option is to stack dram cache and NVMe drives. It also really didn't help that it was marketed for gaming in a time when most games were still designed to be loaded from an optical drive.
Nah. What hindered (and still hinders) their growth is a bunch of gamer bois who think loading up their big ram disk is a better option than Optane because it's cheaper. Lol Don't believe me? Look at some of the idiot comments.
Probably the same ones who whine that NVIDIA cards are overpriced for what gaming experience they give. Yet the AMD cards they cite can't do what I do with NVIDIA GPUs (AI/ML/Data Science). AMD has a very small niche in that "enterprise use" market, but AI/ML/Data Science isn't one of them.
Note: The green PCIe x8-to-2xU.2 bifurcation adapter Wendell has been using is likely the same design as the Delock 90091 that is also rated for PCIe Gen4. Also available as a PCIe x16-to-4xU.2 variant with the model name 90092.
you forgot to say "first" as a traveler from beyond time
MVP!
Sometimes I might be far ahead but I still see time as a loop so I’d consider myself pretty retarded if I posted something like “first” ;)
I try to only post something with objective content or deeply sarcastic shorts to vent frustration about stuff.
Do I have the thinking correct....if your bios does not support pcie bifurcation you can get around this by getting the 16x card with the pci switch integrated in the card? I am running an old 4770k machine as a server for nextcloud/plex. I doubt the motherboard supports the bifurcation.
@@nathanleopold8972 Yes but cards with a PCIe switch come with a hefty price premium (and more power draw) so it might be worth checking if selling an old platform to migrate to something a bit newer yet still used might make more sense.
Such a shame that Intel canceled Optane. Feels like PCIe gen5 and CXL is what Optane PMEM needs to be fully utilized.
That's what they were saying before it was canceled, and their reasoning behinc canceling it? "To focus on CXL"
(┛ಠ_ಠ)┛彡┻━┻
💀RIP Intel 1968 - 2038💀
@@marcopolo8584 From what I'm reading, they canceled it because of legal reasons.
@@timramich Oh, probably related to Micron's involvement with the tech. That's extremely disappointing. Tech being held back by law. Something should be done about this.
@@marcopolo8584 Search for an article called "There Is Nothing Wrong With Optane And 3D Xpoint." It's both Intel and Micron who aren't allowed to use the tech now.
I've used an optane for dev git usage for years now, and i recently updated my workstation. However, in plain normal daily use it's still twice as fast as some of the fastest modern ssds. RIP, optane, you will be missed...
The price of Optane is still nuts. Often times, RAM is cheaper. Will ZFS just use RAM if it's available to cache that metadata?
ZFS caches everything in RAM given the opportunity. RAM is a much faster cache and the size available these days should be plenty. The Meta Data storage does sound exciting however you need at least two Optanes because they are critical to your stored data. They also must be big enough. I think I will stick to RAM as cache because when I tried normal SSD as cache it actually slowed down a lot for large writes such as virtual hard drive files. An array of 4 drives is actually quite fast.
I tried doing the "find . | wc" not knowing that I had enough ram for zfs to have a copy of the metadata in ram or atleast thats what im assuming was causing it to return in 1.356 seconds with 117265 files. This is against a raidz3 of 12 1tb spinning disks.
Whatever is in RAM doesn't survive reboot. That's the whole point in PERSISTENT storage. It's there when you need it. Don't have to wait for it to load up the RAM every time you have to reboot. And if you're running SQ, RAPIDS, or anything else which loads into RAM? Does you motherboard support more than 128GB? Because all that stuff in RAM adds up quickly. I don't have time to sit here and wait for that rust to be loaded into RAM., When I need it, I need it. Persistent storage is a thing for a reason. There's a reason why Windows and Linux doesn't just load itself up all in ram. (You can do that with Apline, however. :) )
@@georgebrandon7696 Between having ram and a normal SSD, you get all the benefit without paying for overpriced Optane. Optane is great but you can get a boatload of RAM and a normal SSD for less.
@@BandanazX what benefit is that? Having to wait until the data is read into ram, then lost during reboot? Persistent memory is a thing for a reason. If you don't understand why, then STFU.
Also, sure, DDR4 is cheap as dirt. DDR5, and ECC DDR5 is not. And it won't be until years AFTER DDR6 hits CPUs and motherboards.
I've liked the Optane technology, but it's just too darned expensive. I have a 16GB drive that I use for the temp folder on my main machine. It does speed up installations quite a bit, and takes a small load off my main drive.
Why bother? I use RAM Disk for temp and I don't even need to clean it ever.
@@chounoki Not enough RAM for a RAM disk big enough for a temp folder. Many installers and updaters use the temp folder and need 8GB or more of space. Even with that 16GB Optane drive, I run into issues sometimes and have to temporarily change my temp variable to get them to run.
* laughs in 32gbs of *RAM* *
Too expensive is a relative term. How expensive is it to keep replacing NVME drives that wear out much faster than an enterprise-grade NVME? 20 years from now, you still have the same Optane device. You might have gone through 4 regular NVMEs. And this isn't just about replacem4nt costs either. You then have downtime to change those NVMEs. Time is money.
@@chounoki Why bother? Because anything and everything in RAM doesn't survive a reboot.
I remember when Optane was first becoming a thing. A lot of cheap laptops would use it to store the paging file instead of adding more RAM lol.
And those small Optane sticks aren't much faster than SATA SSD.
Yeah, my HP Spectre X360 13 OLED had "48GB of RAM" (16GB RAM + 32 GBOptane = "48Gb Of RaM").
It wasn't cheap, though. It was $1500. The OLED screen is great, though.
@@tim3172 weird, most of the ones I've seen were Walmart specials with Celerons and 2GB of RAM
@@TadanoHitohito I don’t think a HP g60 had intel optane considering it costed more than the entire computer
@@Jushwa I don't know about that particular model, but I remember seeing more than a few computers advertised as having "2GB + 32GB" of RAM a while back
I use the 16 and 32 gb optane as boot drives for NAS and firewall devices instead of USB devices. They work nicely and haven't had any problems yet unlike my USB boot drives.
I would have liked to see a comparison of the directory scan time against conventional flash storage as well.
With a fast gen4 nvme drive, I doubt there is much difference. I would rather get a gen4 nvme drive with more space that I can use for other things than an expensive Optane that's pretty much slower in every category except 4k read at queue depth of 1.
Yep. Rocking 2x Optane 280GB 900p’s. The 900p is (IMHO) at the sweet spot of affordability and performance. They’re getting a little harder to find as stocks deplete but I ended up getting new old stock from a seller in China to complete my mirrored setup.
Wendell. This is sadly one of the few times when you have to put US only in the title. Newegg UK, ships its Optane gear from the US. So shipping costs are untenable. Shipping would add 60% to the cost of the 58GB version ($82 all told). That's not far off the base price of the 118GB version. Useful info as always, Wendell.
why is it that it's so expensive to ship things to Europe? Or the United Kingdom for that matter? I mean what exactly is there that's so special that everything that is being shipped to the UK makes it so darn expensive?
Cries in Australian
Yeah, I can't find any Optane stuff anywhere here in Europe. And ordering from the US is prohibitively expensive. If a seller doesn't have a warehouse in Europe or there are resellers over here, it's often not worth it.
@@MickeyMishra It's not the freight as much as VAT + toll + handling fees
@@MickeyMishra water
I just snagged a P1600X 118 GB for about 80 bucks from Amazon. The very last one I could purchase here in Germany and that's only because it's shipped from the US. I think I'm gonna make it a boot drive!
Just the thumbnail alone grants this video infinite amounts of absolutely stellar meme worthiness. Oh and this means that the video is also entitled to an _absolutely_ *INSTANT* like from me, as well! (and I haven't even begun watching the video in the first place... oh man.)
What you've done with all this power is... is... *MEMEWORTHY!* You absolute *legend!* ! I mean like, if it were up to me then I say that you've hit an absolute _f-ing_ home run with this one, Wendel!! Chapeau!
Thanks for the tip. I think I'll put my page (swap) file on one of these. I'm satisfied with my ZFS performance because I don't have much going on with it, like it's not a factor when I want to watch a movie or store my disk image backups.
Optane makes an awesome L2 cache when using something like Primocache. Time to stock up I guess!
Really well done on the weight loss Wendell - looking great!
Optane seems like it'd be super useful on the dedupe tables where very very low latency and small reads/writes are necessary!
i hope optane is not dead forever, it’s a great technology
Oh, I just get why I see only 50MB/s on my SSDs most of the time. Thanks game devs!
Does anybody know the model of the Gigabyte pcie 4x m.2 card Wendall showed at timestamp 7:50?
Seems like the German market hasn't heard of the fire sales yet. They still charge 700€ for the 112GB version...
Bought 2 118gb optane. Thanks for the heads up!
PrimoCache is very good when using Optane as the "L2" cache. I have 4x1TB NVME (Intel 670p) that have 512GB of Intel Persistent Memory (1st gen) in front of them and 32GB of DDR4 ECC 2666 in front of that. The whole setup gets about 18GB/sec in Crystal Disk Mark for the Seq 1M Q8T1, but 680MB/sec in RND4K Q1T1. Latency is around 5 microseconds. I can't really recommend the Intel 670p, but I wanted a full-Intel stack to avoid issues with VROC (it's RAID0, just for games so who cares if it goes up in smoke). It's a shame that prices on Optane were so high and that now it's all being tossed out like this, I would have liked to see an affordably priced solution like the H20 but maybe using 2+TB of NAND and, well, a meaningful amount of Optane for gaming-like workloads (or other desktop-class use). If this had come as a PCIe x16 card it wouldn't have been a big deal, but it probably would have worked better than having to rig up something like I have. Also, the Solidigm tool that replaced the original Intel one for the NVME stuff is slow and clunky. It's such a shame it all went the way it did, but oh well.
Am i the only one taken aback by the appearance of the zombie portraits of the golden girls in the 45 drives chassis segment? LMAO! - Noyce. So. Much. Win.
Lmao. I was just ordering rn when it suddenly said it was completely out-of-stock (no more back order). Was pretty bummed out until I refreshed the page again.. It changed into “In Stock”.
Ordered for my game server / zfs samba system. Thanks for the insight!!!
I've been using 16 gig optane drives as my swap drives in Linux (even on AMD systems) for years. Only makes a difference when the systems are under memory pressure though. I'm somewhat tempted to buy a bunch of 118 gig optanes and use those as my swap partitions instead. Figured it would be better to flood an optane drive with writes than to do the same with a nand flash.
they aren't availble anymore
@@acasccseea4434 Yeah, I just watched this video now just a day later and I already can't get either the 58GB or 118GB. I was going to get one and use it as a cache drive in Unraid and for my Plex Docker that just loves to constantly write to it for some reason. I like the fact that write durability is basically infinite whereas now I keep monitoring my M.2 SSD to make sure it's still ok.
Do auto notify. A large number are on the way back on stock. Large. Number.
why are 4 optane drives recommended, instead of just 1 or 2?
So that they are striped to improve performance
OOS after 1 hour LOL. I have a question: would I be better off to 1) get 3 x 1TB gen 4 TLC-NAND nvme for special metadata device to allow more small files stored on them, verse 2) 3 x 118GB Optane that has only space to store metadata for home lab use case.
I have two P1600X 58GB drives in my ZFS server and contrary to what you state in this video I can confirm that they're Gen3 x4:
LnkSta: Speed 8GT/s (ok), Width x4 (ok)
Intel's spec sheet backs this up. What did you see that led you to believe they only have a Gen3 x2 interface?
Sold out. $5 off on the smaller one is gone and back ordered.
Messed up thing is I bought an Optane drive before intel announced it was dead.
Optane prices seem a lot higher on Amazon UK 😞
Alright, so how do I get started setting this up in TrueNAS scale? I've bought 2x Optane 118gb and have them ready for mirroring and use as a Metadata drive! A little nudge in the right direction would be much appreciated 😎
This thumbnail on its own deserves a like and subscribe, no doubt.
I'm using a 250gb Samsung 980 Pro NVMe drive for cache in my ZFS array. Would optane be a better solution?
I use the 16GB optane modules as boot drives for firewalls (pfsense.) The H20 would work in theory in an AMD system if you could bifurcate the nvme 4x slot into 2x2.
What about gaming rig - any use of optane here?
Metadata special device makes my hard drive array searchable over samba full stop.
It is the only thing that allows this.
Also shoving small blocks into the zfs special device means I have circumvented the biggest downside of these SMR drives I bought.
Those 16Gb and 32Gb Optane devices, make for great boot devices, in places where you would sometimes us a flash drive...
I use as boot devices for truenas and unraid.... works super well, more reliable and faster than flash drives... those at the code of an M.2 slot...
That sounds like a pretty profligate use of an Optane. Why not just get a USB DOM and put one of those extra USB2 headers cluttering the motherboard to some use? 8GB DOMs are dirt cheap on Aliexpress and more than fast enough considering you're only spending a minute per boot reading from it. Once your NAS is booted up the performance impact of having the kernel and /usr on a USB2 flash drive is negligible, all the files it accesses regularly are cached in RAM anyway.
Fair....
I happened to have access to a couple of them and didn't really have a better use for them because of the limited size.... so was meh, lets see how this goes, and worked pretty well.
Yes but there is probably a better use for your M.2 slot. TrueNAS Core boots fine off a pair of USB sticks. I've been running mine like that for a couple of years. Use all the proper connectors for proper storage drives. Wendle is right, the 32GB Optane are too small to be a good decision.
Is this a US only thing? I've checked a few places in the UK and optane looks as expensive as ever :(
Craft Computing has talked about the Sun F80 which is 4x200gb SSDs on a pcie card. Sounds like it could be nice for a ZFS Metadata Special Device.
They're nowhere near the speed of optane, in fact, they're that old they beat a hard drive but not by a crazy amount. The Endurance on them is insane though. Really good for a download drive, scratch drive, server boot drive etc. Look at the iodrive's & iodrive's. They're newer versions of sun drive with same technology just under a different brand name
@@Deleteyourself83 Each drive yes but as a whole in raid 10 it's still significantly faster than a mechanical drive at $50 total instead of more than that per drive.
Possible use case for small octane drives is as a boot disk in something like a pfsense box.
Can we just take a moment to enjoy the sweet, sweet meme of a thumbnail for this video!! Wendell has his thumbnail game on point!!
Still buying all the Optanes I can get, in hope of bridging the time until a new replacement comes out that's as good as Optane. Prices will skyrocket for sure doe, as it's already difficult to get them new where I live.
Is there any way with ZFS to store the metadata on both a specialized device (like an Optane) as well as alongside the actual data? Essentially mirror the standard metadata to a specialized device for look-ups? If so, it would seem that we could get the benefits of fast look-ups with just a single Optane device without the risk of losing your metadata in the case of a failure of your specialized device.
I thought l2arc stores metadata. L2ARC Optane would effectively do that if my premise is true
I'd like to know this too. It seems strange that you can either go high-risk and _only_ store it on a separate device, or _only_ store it with the actual data... but you aren't able to just do both.
@@Blacklands see my comment. I thought I had posted the relevant info before, but I hadn’t. Short answer, L2ARC by default does store metadata.
L2ARC does, by default store metadata, at least on Linux. You can view how much is being stored using the arc_summary command.
“By default both MRU and MFU data and metadata are cached in the L2ARC.”
@Another Language Glad I was of help. To answer your question, L2ARC will only speeds up reads, while special device will also speed up writes.
The Zombie Golden Girls are slaving away next to the test rig. Nice.
540 € isn't exactly a "fire" sale...
7:48 - 8:19 @level1techs. How do these M.2 adapters play with Dell PE Servers (R530)? I'm looking to have 4 NVMEs on one of those adapters. 2 for Truenas OS in Mirror and 2 for Meta...Helpful video btw. Thanks.
If I recall correctly, Rx20 generation don't support bifurcation, on Rx30 and later is supported.
Sue one with a bridge should be fine then
A note about slog and optane, don't bother with the 32/64gb m.2 optane drives. You can wear those out easy. Our home server killed one of those in 2 years.
Optane drives will the the used HGST enterprise drives of the future NAS person. Too bad I already rebuilt my NAS in a MiniX last year :(
The 16 and 32 gb optane you can use as scratch drives. I keep my downloads on mine rather then on my main drive.
11:10 I got 2 of the 960GB optane 905P drives for this and 6 of the 118GB drives(only the 905Ps were bough on sale)
I really wish ZFS would let you have two L2 arc caches and be able to set one of them to metadata only, but it seems like that is a setting that applies to your arc caching globally?
Metadata l2 arc just seems like it should be better for light/home servers, only one disk without redundancy requirement, sounds like less risk with better MB compatibility, althought it seems to exclude having a second l2 for data.
If your concern is wasting valuable L2 capacity on something that doesn't need to be there, you can use datasets to restrict which folders get to put all their stuff in the L2 and which only get to put their metadata there. For example pool/anime could be metadata only, because your anime collection doesn't really benefit from being cached, while pool/games and pool/home could be data+metadata, because those do benefit from the cache.
If you're talking about having something like a 1TB NVME SSD as the data cache and a 16GB Optane as the metadata cache, you should probably reconsider your setup. L2ARC needs to maintain a lookup registry in RAM, sort of like a metadata of itself, and that steals capacity from your primary ARC. Adding too much L2ARC, unless your system has 64+GBs of RAM or something already, is probably going to harm performance rather than help, because the data that otherwise would be kept in super fast RAM now needs to be read from a comparatively slow SSD instead. ZFS also isn't great at NVME SSDs to begin with. It's tuned for HDD, which means rather than flooding the SSD with every request it can find, which NVME loves, it will carefully sort the list by sector and issue it a few IOPS at a time, which is great for HDD and doesn't really matter for SATA SSD, but really isn't a good way to handle NVME. You'll have a better experience just formatting your NVME SSD with XFS and using it for your root/home/game drive, running a nightly rsync to back it up to your ZFS pool.
Is SSD/NVME caching worth while, if you're a home user w/ a dedicated Hardware RAID controller that has 512MB/1GB onboard RAID caching?
Yeah, not worth it. The problem with normal NAND flash is that when it's writing hard it gets really slow. This is true when it's storing stuff for reading too. This can actually make a fast array run slower than without it. The reason NAND flash devices are fast is they have caching of their own, when this is saturated they are actually quite slow. The on board caching of your card sounds much better. The operating system also does some RAM caching with whatever RAM is not in use. Adding more RAM to your system helps even if technically it has enough, the excess becomes cache.
I wonder if the reduced prices will happen in Australia... I wouldn't mind a small caching SSD since my main one is full and several games have ended up on old technology.
Edit: Looks like that's going to be a nope. Hardly anything stocked, and most still at original prices.
Same in Europe, as far as I can tell. It's so hard to find, it barely even exists. And then it's super expensive.
@@Blacklands Yup... was hoping to snag some on sales but nada. So, mini box project for homeserver + pfsense router got shelved and put the money to building PCs for family members.
I wanna give you a hug..my newegg shipping cart is full.
Something great that came out of this was that Intel relinquished its SSD division to the company the were buying SSD components from in the first place. Solidigm. Since then Solidigm has started offering some awesome priced SSD boasting impressive read/write numbers. These dont serve the same purpose as the Optane but its still awesome nonetheless. i hope Solidigm can gain traction and I will personally be trying their SSDs in my newest PC build.
If only we could get a persistent memory alternative or a caching system like ZFS' for windows, containers, databases and web servers. As it currently stands applications are either written as on disk or in memory without enough foresight that users want a something to load after startup and save at regular intervals or shutdown to disk but run/cached/operate from RAM saving changes to disk.
Sad to see Optane go frankly. Was hoping to see something more from it.
I would love it if you would do a video talking about why you don't recommend the Intel Optane 900P/905P devices.
Thank you.
What could you do with those 16 gb drives in 2024?
fk, I'm too late on this. You are blowing up prices wendell! :D
They are back in stock! Grab while they last 🙂
At least LVM got a shout out :) Even if I sense some hesitation :D
Is there really nothing you can do on the 16GB ones? I can only find those in my country, seems like a fun project to work on for dirt cheap.
Waste of a M.2 slot. Might be OK on a desktop system for Windows system on a HDD as a ReadyBoost drive. I've found that ReadyBoost really does help. It does two things, it stores a file for fast booting, it assists with other MS tech for speeding up loading. The problem is the systems that benefit from ReadyBoost are usually old ones with no M.2 slot. An SSD C: drive would be much better.
@@wayland7150 Well with current PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives booting from cold is pretty fast. ReadyBoost doesn't shave off that much time.
@@brodriguez11000 PCIe 4.0 NVMe hard drives, crikey.
Just ordered the 118 gb version. Hoping to use it as a general cache just to speed up everyday usage/loading times. I have a sabrent rocket 4 as my main drive, and am going to grab a few 18tb exos drives and start a Plex/jellyfin server as well.
Did it make a difference for you?
@@Slavolko not particularly lol. i have a pretty fast pc. still neat though
Bought some 58gb Optane for $35 just now on Newegg. Gonna put it an Asus BR1100 netbook with a Jasper Lake Celeron and 4gb ram as boot drive instead of the default 64gb eMMC.
The performance of the BR1100 improved significantly when so put in a cheap NVME SSD, I wonder how much better it can get if the OS and pagefile run on Optane vs regular NAND.
Good vid! Keep up the GREAT work! Where do you get those M.2 Adapter cables for the for the 2.5"? TY!
Question, how much worse is are the consumer SSDs?
Consumer ssds certainly aren't getting better with durability like how the 980/990 pro are half as durable as the 970 pro was for caching.
I did buy one with 25% off during black friday. It is a good stuff that last soooo long I can even show it to grandkids. So, why not.
Is the 905p still the best OS and application drive over say a Seagate Firecuda 530?
It is. Low latency at QD1 makes your OS snappier than any NAND device. You also don't have "glitches" when drive fills up, or garbage collector kicks in.
2:02 did you mean too slow or too small? Shouldn't they be the same speed as the bigger capacities?
I'm working on my first build, 5x14TB. No idea how much I would need.
I just recently got a u.2 drive for my evga x299 ftw K and I am having post issues.
I am using one of 10gtek's u.2 cables, when I plug in the supplemental sata power, the pc gets stuck at post code 06.
If i unplug the supplemental power, it does not show up in disk manager.
When you say "striped three way mirror" are you referring to a traditional Raid 5 with three OptAne drives?
Not raid 5 more like raid 10 but ZFS in THREE 2-way mirrors
Thank you for the tip on the Optane sale. What are your thoughts about using on a Proxmox ceph cluster for DB and WAL disk? e.g. each host with 2TB NVME OSD plus 118GB Optane for DB and WAL.
Can't find any 58GB or 118GB optane ssd modules in my region (outside US). But I can find optane Memory, in 256gb, 512gb ddr4 modules. Anyway these could be mounted on some pcie 3 card and used as vdev? or maybe directly on the motherboards main memory slots?
SLOG is generally a useless endeavor for home lab TrueNAS system, and they don’t need to be large, in fact most 10Gb systems only need 16-32GB max. SLOG devices need to be high endurance, non-volatile and low latency, which Optane is, but generally don’t offer performance improvement as without a SLOG device it will default to using RAM, which is faster. SLOG devices are primarily used more for data integrity purposes. TrueNAS in their enterprise offering actually uses NVDIMM for this, since it’s orders of magnitude faster than NAND from a latency perspective and essentially the closest thing you can get to RAM while being non-volatile, but the modules are only 16-32 GB even with their systems that have 100Gb networking.
Was a fan until my 3 year old HP Desktop with 16gb Optane died. I mean the Optane chip died. And I never figured out how to disable it or get the system to boot. Luckily, I was able to get a backup of my 1TB drive. Now I'm running off a Mini Desktop with a 4 core Intel M5105 with 16gb Ram and 500gb boot drive. And it works well.
Would raid one be sufficient for a special volume?
I remember when Linus mentioned Optane in a recent video and I was like, wait, it still exists?
What happens in case of poewer loss while let's say the data was written to SLOG but not yet to the HDDs. Does that happen? Is it the same as regular rules that apply to COW if it didn't write then it didn't and it's gone. But I'm trying to understand what is looked at here when there's a SLOG. The actual SLOG or the HDDs?
Finally optane that you can obtain...
Could you get like 1 or 2 and use them for zfs ARC
Not seeing these prices anywhere on new egg. Was that a black Friday only price
Are Coral processors available now? I wanted to get a USB one, but they were just gone, everywhere. I can get an orange pi from AliExpress, but I thought a Coral was unobtainium.
I just use optane as swap since unlike caching it allows me to run software with memory leaks cheaper than buying 64GB ram.
I am on this thread where it shows how to list the number of files by size. I don't run ZFS yet, but I want to when I get new drives. How do I know how large of Optane drives I'd need? I would not be using the special_small_blocks feature. It would just be for metadata.
Sold out before I could even figure out how to get it shipped within the US and billed to Canada... wow.
You have to have excessive memory to replace the caching function of Optane.. Makes for great write intense applications.. so make a write intensive drive array. Still if these are needed long term, there is no substitution for SLC (100k+ writes)
Would any of this be compatible with AMD storeMI? It has easily configurable tiered storage options, but idk if it has the right features for optane since it's an Intel product.
Optane referred by Wendell is NVMe device. It will work as regular PCIe NVMe SSD - so yes, it will work in any system that supports NVMe SSDs.
This is just an insanely compact beautiful masterpiece, thanks for this great advice!!
Yes you see this right. I replied Trice!
Trying to connect the 905P U.2 version to a notebook. Problem is, I need to connect the m.2 to u.2 cable which requires SATA power. But which voltage does it need? Does it run on 5V or 12V? And bonus question - has anybody found a standalone power supply for SATA drives? Otherwise I have to get a desktop PSU and only use the SATA ports.
Taking notes for my Epyc Truenas build in 2023.
Sadly in Germany those are still freaking expensive... the 118GB goes for >700€ or are not available at all.
400€ here on Amazon Italy. Damn...
Yeah, they barely seem to exist in Europe. :(
Love the Optane support PCIE and Nvme pcie built into the my new Asus Prime X299 Deluxe 30th intel MOBO....
Bring back optane :( its a hidden gem, need to be used to its intended usage
i find this now.... 4 months later
Can these be used with Linux HoloISO? Would be cool to get a 2TB HDD with this.