Intel Optane H20 + AMD B550 MB = WTF

[Count von Schwalbe]

So I am building a system with a Ryzen 5 3600, in a AsRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4/ac motherboard. The NVMe drive I was planning on using for boot is an Intel Optane H20 drive (essentially a 760p with a 32gb Optane module). It is not being viewed correctly by my Windows 10 install media. The SSD side is 512gb, but the drive is showing up as 27gb. I can only imagine it is viewing the Optane flash instead of the NAND flash as the drive. Is there any way to force or fix this?

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

So I am building a system with a Ryzen 5 3600, in a AsRock B550 Phantom Gaming 4/ac motherboard. The NVMe drive I was planning on using for boot is an Intel Optane H20 drive (essentially a 760p with a 32gb Optane module). It is not being viewed correctly by my Windows 10 install media. The SSD side is 512gb, but the drive is showing up as 27gb. I can only imagine it is viewing the Optane flash instead of the NAND flash as the drive. Is there any way to force or fix this?

So I plan on cloning Windows 10 to it on another computer which does recognize the correct side of it. However, I am not sure if it will work as the SSD part of the system does not seem to be visible even to BIOS.

 

[defaultluser]

Of course it is viewing the drive as Optane first. Anytime you blend multiple flash drives on the same module, you need to have a native driver to sort-out the mess!

DRAM caching works seamlessly because it' s local to the drive, and assumed to be volatile. -- BY COMPARISON, your OPTANE Shit Sandwich (TM) has two different layers that must be managed after power loss.

Why not just buy any other flash drive? The performance of that tiny 32GB flash cache is not any faster than DRAM, once exhausted

 

[Flaky]

H20 is just updated H10, isn't it? I assume so.
It combines two separate NVMe devices on one PCB. It relies on host platform's capability to bifurcate one x4 PCIe link into two x2 links.
Without the split, only one device will be accessible. Most often it is SSD, but a different thing happens on AMD systems for some reason. Worth a read -> this

Give it a try via adapter in second x16 slot.

 

[Lenne]

Does Optane even work with AMD platform?

 

[Steevo]

Buy 16 more GB or RAM and make a RAM drive.

 

[newtekie1]

Does Optane even work with AMD platform?

I believe it does if you have one of the drives with the Optane drive and SSD on one unit like OP. However, it can be tricky.

Personally, Optane accelerating an NVMe SSD is one of the most useless things ever. It makes exactly 0 noticeable difference in real world use compared to a good NVMe drive. I'd say this is why Intel killed Optane for the consumer market.

It's nice for caching for a HDD, but that is basically all I'd use it for. And even then, if you want a SSD cache for a HDD, get a larger SSD and use PrimoCache to set up a cache for the HDD. Optane in the consumer market was worth it when it first came out, but SSDs evolved so fast Optane became useless in the consumer space very quickly.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

I don't disagree that optane is a shit sandwich, the only reason I had one is from another computer that I was planning on replacing, which it was not using. According to Intel's website, on non-supported systems it should see a 512gb PCIe x2 drive, but it is seeing a 32gb drive instead. I will try to check on the bifurcation though.

 

[DavidC1]

I believe it does if you have one of the drives with the Optane drive and SSD on one unit like OP. However, it can be tricky.

Personally, Optane accelerating an NVMe SSD is one of the most useless things ever. It makes exactly 0 noticeable difference in real world use compared to a good NVMe drive. I'd say this is why Intel killed Optane for the consumer market.

It's nice for caching for a HDD, but that is basically all I'd use it for. And even then, if you want a SSD cache for a HDD, get a larger SSD and use PrimoCache to set up a cache for the HDD. Optane in the consumer market was worth it when it first came out, but SSDs evolved so fast Optane became useless in the consumer space very quickly.

I think the "Optane Memory" branded devices should have had the option of extending memory like on server and Memory Drive tech. If you paid like $400 extra, then you get the Memory Drive software, which allowed using part of the space to extend as slow RAM. Way better than running out of RAM entirely and much better than hitting pagefiles on SSDs. Unless you get ridiculously over capacity memory it almost goes into page file. In fact programs are designed for it.

I don't disagree that optane is a shit sandwich, the only reason I had one is from another computer that I was planning on replacing, which it was not using. According to Intel's website, on non-supported systems it should see a 512gb PCIe x2 drive, but it is seeing a 32gb drive instead. I will try to check on the bifurcation though.

Optane on PCI Express should have always been a temporary thing. Optane on DIMMs should be a long term goal. Open it up and make it fully DDR5 compatible, so it can run on all systems, not just Intel systems that needs to support Optane.

I've read of comments that say they should have made a proper single controller and use Optane to replace DRAM on SSDs. DRAM isn't used to cache user-space data on SSDs, which means replacing with Optane ends up being slower so you need DRAM anyway. So rather than Optane + DRAM + Optane controller + DRAM controller + NAND, you end up with Optane + DRAM + Controller + NAND. With Intel out of the SSD controller part, no option of in-house controllers now.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

I think the "Optane Memory" branded devices should have had the option of extending memory like on server and Memory Drive tech. If you paid like $400 extra, then you get the Memory Drive software, which allowed using part of the space to extend as slow RAM. Way better than running out of RAM entirely and much better than hitting pagefiles on SSDs. Unless you get ridiculously over capacity memory it almost goes into page file. In fact programs are designed for it.



Optane on PCI Express should have always been a temporary thing. Optane on DIMMs should be a long term goal. Open it up and make it fully DDR5 compatible, so it can run on all systems, not just Intel systems that needs to support Optane.

I've read of comments that say they should have made a proper single controller and use Optane to replace DRAM on SSDs. DRAM isn't used to cache user-space data on SSDs, which means replacing with Optane ends up being slower so you need DRAM anyway. So rather than Optane + DRAM + Optane controller + DRAM controller + NAND, you end up with Optane + DRAM + Controller + NAND. With Intel out of the SSD controller part, no option of in-house controllers now.

Yes and no, the Optane/NAND drives worked like StoreMI, but fast and faster rather than fast and slow. A good idea and a good way to decrease the cost of fast storage, but the bifurcated bus really hurt sequential speeds, and drastically reduced compatibility.

 

[newtekie1]

I think the "Optane Memory" branded devices should have had the option of extending memory like on server and Memory Drive tech. If you paid like $400 extra, then you get the Memory Drive software, which allowed using part of the space to extend as slow RAM. Way better than running out of RAM entirely and much better than hitting pagefiles on SSDs. Unless you get ridiculously over capacity memory it almost goes into page file. In fact programs are designed for it.

Except the Memory Drive software was shown to really be nothing better than just putting your page file right on the Optane SSD. That's why it failed, people realized they were paying $400 for a gimmick.