Hello all, I am in the process of updating my Flightsim computer - currently 2700K 16Gb GTX970. The disk layout is (1st SSD) OS  (2nd SSD) P3D and addon scenery (1st HDD 2Tb) Photoscenery files covering all of Western Europe. The new computer will be able to use M.2 so will have NVME for the OS and a partition for P3D The remaining disk layout is the same. With a spare M.2 slot should I get Optane to cache the HDD? My questions are;

Will Optane work on a non OS disk - there seems some doubt about whether I can specify Optane to work only on the HDD

Will Optane be of use in reading Photoscenery  files consisting of thousands of bgl's.

Anybody have a handle/comment on this?

Thanks & regards

Gordon

On 9/16/2018 at 8:13 AM, hovercrafter said:

Will Optane work on a non OS disk - there seems some doubt about whether I can specify Optane to work only on the HDD

Yes, with the latest software - see: https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/000027987/memory-and-storage.html. With regards to HDDs, Optane is designed to work best with HDDs. It will work with SATA SSDs but is probably not worth the money for the small improvement you'd get. From Intel's FAQs (https://www.intel.co.uk/content/www/uk/en/support/articles/000024018/memory-and-storage/intel-optane-memory.html😞

" You can get Intel® Optane™ memory to accelerate any type of SATA-based storage media, including SATA SSDs. However, performance benefits of adding Intel® Optane™ memory are greater on slower storage devices like an HDD, versus a faster storage device like a SATA-SSD."

Also worth noting that PCIe NVMe drives aren't supported for system acceleration.

Have you noticed any problems with photoscenery using platter drives? I've got basic 7200rpm HDDs (added 3x 6TB for photoscenery a few months back), and they seem pretty good for ortho in P3D (and x-plane).

I notice some slowness to load the textures with 12.5cm per pixel in P3D, but it's pretty good at 25cm per pixel and above.

I haven't really noticed an improvement when I put the ortho onto a SSD.

The reason that I ask is that I'm always after better ortho performance, but i'm not convinced that a modern internal 7200rpm HDD is the rate-limiting step - though If it is in some circumstances, then Optane would be very interesting!

On 9/22/2018 at 5:01 PM, OzWhitey said:

I haven't really noticed an improvement when I put the ortho onto a SSD.

The reason that I ask is that I'm always after better ortho performance, but i'm not convinced that a modern internal 7200rpm HDD is the rate-limiting step - though If it is in some circumstances, then Optane would be very interesting!

If you didn't notice a difference with the SSD then you certainly won't with the Optane/HDD combo.

Many thanks for the responses.... I have just come across a youtube video by linus tech tips that tested the optane. Interestingly the memory used is non volatile (didn't know that) and the caching was persistent even after the computer was restarted. The video showed the Optane producing benefits for games upto 60gb in size after multiple uses..

I am left thinking that if I constrained my flying to a few counties then after a few passes over the countryside real benefits would occur. But flying from Scotland over England, France and Spain (say) using nigh on a terrabyte of scenery bgl files would swamp the Optane.

Gordon

Thanks Oz for the comment. Yes I do have loading problems with photoscenery but this may well be because of my using an 6-7 year old computer ! The hard disk transfer speed is 3gbps for instance. So a newer motherboard will help considerably.

Gordon