Intel Optane is DEAD. Long Live Intel Optane! Buy them cheap right now...

we're having a funeral for optane uh more of a wake really and it's party time because optane's on sale this is not a drill oh my gosh I'm going to show you some cool stuff you can do with the optane you can get for really cheap [Music] okay first of all this video is mainly about ZFS and Like Home Server stuff you can do with your optane I want to show you a bunch of different options mainly we're going to talk about ZFS and how it can really speed up ZFS if you have a Home Server that's based on ZFS and you use optane for caching you can use optane for other you know raid Solutions you know unraid anything like that they have their own caching systems but for ZFS it's the metadata special device that I want to cover you could say that I'm a fan of optane I've always been a fan of optane there's a lot of hard one obtained from way back in the day on my desk look at all this these drives the p4800x this is the Enterprise version this is 750 gigs on a pcie card or a u.2 you know these two and a half inch drives you can use these in your desktop computer it doesn't matter if you don't have a slot for these you can use this adapter cable and look this just plugs into an m.2 slot it's low profile I've even put this in The Cooler Master nr200 small form factor case with the thick two and a half inch pcie device yeah p5800x optane now the second gen obtains they're not on fire sale but the first gen are look at this madness I have the 58 gig I've got 112 gig and I've also got a bunch of the h20s so the H20 is a special device we'll come back to it it's hybrid Flash and optane and it's just a little bit of a special use case I also got some of these 16 gig octanes because these were like 10 bucks each I got these in a different sale these are I can't recommend these these they're just they're just too slow there's not a lot you can do with the individual 16 and 32 gig optane m.2 devices I'm sorry it's just don't recommend it but that's okay because there is a crapload of stuff on sale these 58 and 112 gig optane and an m.2 form factor these are what's on sale and this is the awesome spot this is actually well at the time that I'm doing this video there's a new egg limit it was limit three per person and I wrote in a bunch of complaints that was like no I need to be able to buy four and eight of these at a time because if you're a ZFS Aficionado or you like doing stuff with ZFS you really should buy four or eight of these if you really want to dramatically speed up your array with the metadata special device but I'm getting there I'm getting there you've got adapters like this one this is two u.2 into eight pcie Lanes this is a special PCI Express 4.0 compatible card these are really hard to find you buy these on AliExpress or eBay and they say they're pcie4 compatible but they're not actually pcie E4 compatible a lot of the time you have to use these in a slot on the motherboard that's physically closer to the CPU the ones at the lower part of the motherboard won't work because these cards are a little sketchy but this is a great way to get PCI Express 4 connectivity for your second gen optane fortunately all of the optane on fire sale is PCI Express 3. so you're not going to have any of those problems the 900 and 905p now the 905p is what's on sale it's essentially the same as our PE 4800x series here I've got a bunch of the 375 gig P40 p4800x I like those a little better than the 900 and the 905 for a couple of reasons but they're still a really good buy this is the reserver from Seed Studio that plus this wee little m.2 this is a coral.ai uh tensor processing unit this is the one that's got two on it this in there with two mechanical 20 terabyte hard drives plus an optane for storage the octane is never going to wear out that's what we're buying here that's what makes optane better than nand for all these applications is that you're rotting to it a lot and you'd never have to worry about the right part of it wearing out I mean it can break there's other stuff that can go wrong with it but in terms of exhausting the right capabilities of the device it's probably not going to happen to you for any kind of halfway reasonable workload and about seven unreasonable ones there are also these adapter cards you can put four m.2 on a single pcie why would you ever want to do that so with ZFS you have to understand when you've got a mechanical array your data is broken up across a whole bunch of hard drives it's like raid but CFS is a little more advanced than rate this also kind of applies to lvm because you can use caching devices on Linux so if you're if you're you know gold star Linux operator and you know about lvm's caching and all this other kind of stuff you can set the same kind of stuff up there too ZFS makes this really easy makes this really easy to do this on true Nas anything else your data is stored on a mechanical hard drive for ZFS to figure out where your files are when you go to ask for a movie it has to look up the metadata of okay where are all the blocks of data and for big files you know there can be one or two levels of indirection meaning that it's going to do a lookup and then another lookup and then by the time it does the third lookup it's got the the giant list of all of the blocks of data for the file so that it can go read and read your movie file mechanical hard drives can do a single i o operation at a time because it's only got the one read write head to move back and forth m.2 storage devices have cues and they can operate massively in parallel when I'm talking about nand Flash you know a normal m.2 not optane those have lots of cues to operate in parallel when you look at Crystal dismark and you look at benchmarks around Q depth one and it just does q depth one benchmarks you know your modern very expensive PCI Express 4 or even now five SSD can usually only manage on the order of 50 to 100 megabytes per second in terms of Q depth 1 i o meaning that the computer asks for one block of data and then it randomly selects another block of data as soon as that one completes and it's that whole round trip time and so because it's only doing one thing at a time tends to be very slow or at least hundreds of megabytes per second instead of thousands of megabytes per second when you've got lots of operations in parallel and to be sure ZFS can request multiple blocks at once as well it's not necessarily just Q depth one but the better the performance of qdf1 the more Snappy and responsive the whole system feels whether you're running a desktop computer ZFS whatever so what you can do with ZFS as you can tell it to store all of the metadata the lookup the indirection for all the blocks on a different device on a special v-dev Now That device still has to have redundancy meaning that you need at least a mirror at least two of these and if your data is really important you may want a three-way mirror I myself Rock a striped mirror or a dual striped mirror meaning that I have four or eight m.2 devices that are storing the metadata in a redundant way available on the storage array and then the data itself is actually stored on mechanical hard drives what this does is it dramatically speeds up any kind of search or lookup or reference operation for seeking the data the mechanical hard drives the poor little Plucky mechanical hard drives where they only have the one read write head and they can only do one i o operation at a time having all of the metadata on different devices immediately takes away all of those metadata i o operations from the mechanical drives so it seems like the entire system is way faster because you're not doing those lookups over there so that's why it can be useful to use a device like this to shove into a PCI Express by 16 slot and get four PCI Express slots this one's from gigabyte you can order these online everybody Under the Sun makes these These are only like 20 bucks you do have to have a bios option that will let you turn on bifurcation so you can run the slot in an X4 X4 X4 X4 mode there are other devices available on the market sometimes devices from liquid HP Enterprise and other storage providers come up on eBay and they're cards that have multiple physical m.2 slots but also have a plx bridge a pcie bridge or something like that on them not a RAID controller there's one or two m.2 raid controllers out there don't use those that's not good with CFS but those controllers is a true pcie Bridge so you could actually have eight pcie Lanes going into four m.2 devices and that works fine or there's a there's even a couple out there that are eight m.2 devices into an x16 slot and that's really awesome if you can get your hands on those but those very rarely come up on eBay so you get to set up some watchwords and sort of know what you're looking for but those plx bridges retail price very very expensive so you're only going to get those on the secondary Market used maybe on AliExpress something like that so for our optane test rig just so you understand this is what I set up it's a very very trivial example I'm not even using any of our petabyte of hard drives or anything like that but I am using the 45 drives chassis and some more chassis below that because it makes it easy to set up many many many many Drive tests but I was very surprised by what I found so I set up a smaller test with just three drives three mechanical drives so this chassis from 45 drives actually has two different three Drive ZFS pools we run ZFS status we can see both of those pools gonna run a very simple command that basically just times how long it takes to scan the whole directory one of those is three mechanical hard drives and the other is three mechanical hard drives with our four-way you know our striped mirror for our ZFS metadata special device that's what we're looking at when we do the ZFS status here we can see we've got a special v-dev and that the special v-dev has our metadata on it and those are are obtaining devices the command that I'm using is time find dot pipe WC so this is going to find Dot and tell us how many things how many lines find a DOT return so you can see it's approximately the same number of things this is the same directory structure between these two ZFS pools same files same everything the pools were set up exactly the same way the drives were set up exactly the same way and then we run the same command again on our other ZFS pool that has the metadata special device 177 365. the number of files that it had to scan in two minutes and 26 seconds all right let's switch arrays I'm just running the same exact command one more time just scan everything the same 177 365 but look at that 30 seconds not two minutes and change that's the power of the metadata special device you'll be able to find whatever it is you need on your array a lot more quickly you'll be able to scan directories find internal stuff you can even use the metadata special device to store very small files so if you wanted to go nuts and add a lot of high endurance optane in the hundreds of gigabytes range and use those as a metadata special device but also store your small files on those as well you know files that are less than your record size you could do that that's an option with ZFS but this is dramatically faster now you might be thinking why can't I use nand storage for this well if your data doesn't change a lot you probably could but optane doesn't really wear out it has orders of magnitude better wear capabilities and it's Q depth 1 performance is always better than nand devices meaning that the latency of servicing that initial Q depth 1 device is going to be lower and as a result of that whenever it's got to do a bunch of Q depth one iOS it's going to be in the hundreds of megabytes per second as opposed to you know 50 or maybe 100 for the really the highest end devices now obtains also have cues so they can do a lot of things in parallel as well it's not just the single performance you get the benefit of the both things happening there so that's really exciting and that's why you might want to buy four or eight 118 or 58 gig optane now I really just recommend that the 118 gig octane the 58 gig optane I also did some testing with it those are only two PCI Express Lanes you could use those two lane pcie devices with something like this and it'll you know not use some of the pcie lanes this works fine with those devices but it's better if you can do the plx bridge because those two pcie lanes they're not going to be insanely fast in terms of raw throughput but they are still going to be low latency and they are still going to have really great performance in low Q depth scenarios you know getting one or two I O operations going per second now if you want to rock optane for your desktop operating system one of the reasons why people didn't do that is because well I mean look these are these are 280 gig so I'm working on another video you know just using these with Windows you can use them with Primo cache so you can get you know a Black Friday sale four terabyte nand flash device those aren't going to have good performance in terms of Q depth one or anything else I mean the transfer rate might look good but you can use primocache and one of these smaller optane even 118 gig octane to accelerate and cache frequently use information on that device that works great the other problem that optane had was your operating system will do that too with any extra memory that you have so if you have a system that's rocking 64 or 128 gigabytes of memory that'll perform really well especially the second time you go to load a game with optane as we see on our ZFS array on a fresh reboot well it didn't have to Cache anything it was already there stored Forever on the device there wasn't anything that had to load and it kind of works like that with Primo cache if Primo cash can cash it on octane then when you go to start a game it's going to be fast because you launched the game the last time you rebooted it it doesn't have to be cached into memory it can be good but the cost benefit well the market decided that uh the cost is a little too high and complication was a little too low but for these Edge use cases like ZFS it's still really good because the devices won't wear out they are insanely low latency and they work really well now I haven't talked about the other ZFS devices you can use the L2 Arc and the s-log separate log device optane is a separate log device it tends to work really well although you're going to want a bigger one so I would recommend like the 280 gig device or the 905 for a separate log and the reason is because this is a single device that is very very fast you can use the 118 gig obtain those are four PCI Express Lanes their write speed is okay it's not fabulous but it's okay and you're then your right s-log will be 118 gigabytes which is probably enough for between you know 10 and 30 seconds of in-flight data to be cached on that device you can also use opting as a separate log device again a larger devices like 280 gig or 3 375 gig or whatever you can get generally will be better because that cash will survive a reboot and that that is like a read cache and it's caching not just the metadata but also the actual data for me for my experience with ZFS I'd much rather have the metadata special device and use my optane for that but if you want to go obtain crazy you could have an L2 Arc and that doesn't need to be redundant that is your Cash Plus your metadata special device as a striped mirror on something like this or even a raid Z1 or you know you can go more than four devices you can go eight that would be fine but all of this is on fire sale and I'm kind of in hoarder mode to hoard these things up and I really wanted to share some ideas about how you can use the 58 and 118 gig octane devices because they're too small to boot from and use as an operating system you wouldn't want to use it as a primary drive because even though the latency is very low everything else is not as fast as modern nand it's good it's good low latency good Q depth one performance but they're outclassed in in other performance by even middle of the road nand flash drive so you really need to get the most out of them you use them in conjunction with something else so when we're talking about something like a laptop if you could theoretically put something together like that for a laptop it might work really well that's exactly what the H20 is it has two pcie lanes for your nand flash device and two pcie lanes for some measure of obtained storage now the 512 gigabyte or the one terabyte versions of the H20 that would be what I would recommend I actually run an H20 in my personal laptop because I like the very low latency of that performance I did a review of that and you can basically launch a whole bunch of applications simultaneously now 32 gigabytes is not really enough in my opinion for modern gaming scenarios and and gaming workloads but for using git with a bunch of small files and visual studio code and switching back and forth between you know the same half a dozen productivity applications constantly the 32 gig obtained as cache works really well and it makes the whole laptop feel snappier because it can launch a whole bunch of things at once I showed that in the video it still works really well you can now buy the H20 devices and use that the rub is you can only use that with Intel rapid storage technology which means Intel laptops it's not going to work on an AMD laptop it's not going to work properly with AMD raid you've got basically no option for any of that you're relegated to Intel RS t for me personally I like it and I think it's worth it which is why I run an H20 in my laptop but optane and special use cases and a eulogy and buy this stuff while it's still on sale uh yeah it's just just a PSA to let you know that that's there and I'm doing this and some fun stuff so if you want to see some benchmarks or some real world or or you want to see me shove you know a 750 gig p4800x in the nr200 again let's do it all right I'm one of those level one I'm signing out you find me in a level one forums [Music]

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 153,003

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: mD6i2toN7lE

Length: 18min 12sec (1092 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 02 2022