Testing Optane Drives in Homelab/Server Usecases, Are They Worth it With the Price Drops?

I have noticed that Optane SSDs like the 900p have had their prices drop significantly after they have been discounted. Today I want to try to find a use case for these ssds in a server environment, and take a look at applications like as a swap drive, zfs log drive, and a ZFS special drive.

0:00 Intro
0:15 Optane overview
0:50 find a good use for Optane drives
2:18 Testing swap drive performance
3:17 Optane and power loss protection
4:00 ZFS log drive perforamnce
4:15 ZFS Special drive testing
5:30 Other Optane server drives to take a look at
6:20 Looking back at Optane drives in the market
7:07 Conclusion

[ericneo]

The huge advantage of these drives was with the DIMM variant that Intel didn't release to the general market. They would have been amazing in servers and laptops, really giving M.2 some fierce competition due to their low latency but it failed because Intel got greedy locked it down to intel servers then charged an insane price of $15, 000 for a 512GB stick. Big thanks for the video.

[anon]

I think there is alot of people getting into homelabs currently. I've personally found you incredibly easy to watch and really clear.

Thanks to your prior videos, I'm now running an unobtrusive Proxmox homelab cluster of 1-liter PCs using Optane accelerators/hybrids as boot drives and enterprise SATA SSDs for the VMs, all second-hand and low-ish cost. This makes for tiny energy-saving nodes that are relatively wear-resistant and impervious to power loss issues, so no RAID setup required.

[Error_]

Thanks for the heads up on ZFS Special Drives. I didn't even know that was a thing. It looks like something worth investigating 👍

[ArtofServer]

yeah, I think your analysis is pretty spot on. I too really wanted to see where Micron and Intel would take Optane, but really sad to see it get shelved. I think the cost per gigabyte was too high, and they just didn't get enough of these into the market to leverage any economies of scale.

[williamcleek]

Good vid. Optane will have a place until NAND drops latency and increases write resiliency. I don't see Optane as capacity - only caching at reduced cost vs RAM. And, your point is valid regarding high workloads, there is a point where parallelism increases making NAND throughput a better choice all around - the choice needing scrutiny on a case by case basis.

[EdvardasSmakovas]

I am buying these for latency and endurance, perfect for zfs and proxmox boot. You could heavily over provision nand SSD's, but pcie gen4+ nand drives are also very hot and it's sometimes a problem. Pity all the selloff is happening in US :/

[iyke]

Great video! For the Optane m.2 stick, you should have used the p1600x 56gb or 112gb for the comparison. It would have performed better, and the price is hard to beat on Newegg right now.

[kelownatechkid]

the 100 & 118gb optanes are perfect for boot disks imo. The 1.5tb models are great too, for ceph. I also use optane for my plex server, as it is great for being constantly hit with transcoding caches, for many tiny reads/writes for images, and for sqlite!

[marcelovidal]

I have one of these 900P 280gb as boot drive on windows 11 some games i put on it! I have too a solidgm p44 pro 1tb tested on my system... Optane make the system faster, Down the DPC a LOT and I don't destroy the other nands on my system over time.
Who got this optanes about 85us be happy.

[honahwikeepa]

I have an old H10 256+16 Intel Optane in my Dell 15 P85F Inspiron. It boots real fast. Thank for the fresh information. Cheers from Sydney Australia 🦘

[I-PixALbI-I]

I wanna Optane drive.. just because it's cooool)

[whyjay]

Maybe one of the other new memory types will take its place. CXL might also provide more uses for something between flash and DRAM in performance.

[FunWithBits]

Price keeps dropping (I guess as expected) The 905p 1.5 TB is $300 on New Egg.

[davideriksen]

Why does this guy look like a actual wizard

[aliancemd]

I've got one of these for a dev machine years ago because it performs great under the small files 70% Random-Read/30% Random-Write use-case and have amazing write endurance but even for this use-case it's overkill, NAND performs basically the same these days for a significantly smaller price. The price starts to make sense when these are used on servers that get hit 24/7 - for any other use-case, NAND basically offers the same performance.

[mbe]

I literally just bought two 280gb optane drives. My hope is to use them as cache for read and write in unraid (maybe truenas I dunno yet)

[TalmidAndy]

These were never meant to be used as boot drives all storage drives. They are a cashe drive meant to be used with Intel's RST to load most commonly used data at the highest possible speed - This is why they are okay as a swap drive but again not what they are designed for. When used as intended on a compatible system they do not make enough of a performance difference to justify the cost unless you have a very specific use case. The new generation of combined SSD and optane memory devices, such as H10 and H20, are a little better but unless you have an 11th gen Intel CPU and Windows OS they are not worth the aggravation to get running in any useful manner.

[AudiSorce]

What about using it as NAS cache? or as boot drive? would it do better than NAND flash?

[jeffnew]

I keep thinking about adding Optane DIMMs to my Dell PowerEdge R740, but the complexity of what DIMMs you need installed where in order for the Optane DIMMs to work is confusing! Any experience with Optane DIMMs?