Solitario
Well-known member
Hello I would like to know if the seagate barracuda st2000dm006 is as fast as a modern ssd. Thank you very much in advance. Best regards.
[SOLVED] A question about a hard drive.
- Thread starter Solitario
- Start date
Solitario
Well-known member
Hi, I found the answer on the net. It's just as fast as an ssd with optane. Thank you very much. Best regards.
No way! Where did you see that?
Even the slowest SSD can run circles around the fastest hard drive.
Optane is just a fast cache device. It is separate from any disk drive. And it only officially works with certain 7th Generation and newer Intel CPUs and only on compatible motherboards. Optane is not designed to work with AMD processors (AMD has their own similar device, StoreMI). Optane can be used with either SSD or hard drives, but money would be better spent on more RAM and/or a bigger boot SSD.
While data stored in the cache drive can be accessed quickly, like all caches and buffers, they are small and they are used to temporarily store high priority data. As soon as your OS needs more data, or you call for new data that is not already loaded into that cache, the OS is forced to go out to the drive again. If a slow hard drive, that would cause delays. If you had a large SSD instead, the OS could fetch that data very quickly.
See 10 Reasons Why Intel's Bleeding-Edge Optane Drive Is a Rip-Off
Last edited:
Solitario
Well-known member
Thank you so much for the explanation. In this forum I learn a lot. Thank you very much for your help. Best regards.
Thanks and you are welcome. I am still curious where you read that about hard drives because if they are saying a hard drive is as fast as a SSD (even with Optane) that is some misinformation that needs to be corrected before someone else gets the wrong idea. If it was just a misunderstanding, then no problem.
From a tech point of view, Optane is super cool. It's the fastest SSD technology on the market in terms of raw benchmarks and numbers, although there's a hefty premium to pay for that. A 32GB Optane stick is the same price as a decent quality 250GB SSD.
The main advantage of Optane and cache drive setups IMHO is that the PC only shows one drive. For some users who need lots of storage but don't want to manage two drives (e.g. a boot SSD and mass storage HDD), Optane can provide some value. I'd still recommend a single SSD if it's affordable though.
Another use of Optane (which wasn't available at launch) would be to have a small SSD as the boot drive, and an Optane accelerated HDD for large programs such as games that don't fit on the SSD. By having an Optane accelerated secondary drive, launching programs off that drive could be much faster. Accelerating Secondary Storage with Intel Optane Memory | PC Perspective
Optane does do a very good job of caching though compared to traditional NAND flash SSD cache drives as Optane drives can run at full performance even when they are at capacity (as is standard practice when using a cache drive).
When compared to just a HDD on it's own, the real-world performance of an Optane accelerated drive is very impressive and in real-world tests performance can be on par with an SSD: Intel Optane Memory 32GB Review - Faster Than Lightning | Client Performance (including RAID testing!)
That said, I'd still recommend:
- A single SSD if you can afford one of a high enough capacity
- A traditional SSD boot drive and large HDD if you are happy managing data on two drives
- An Optane accelerated HDD only if you really don't want to deal with two drives but still want "ssd like" performance for most tasks
Does StoreMI Bring AMD on Par with Intel Optane Memory Caching? | PC Perspective
It also has the same downside as Optane as in that it only works on AMD's X399 or 400 series motherboards. It also has a major disadvantage in that you cannot easily convert an StoreMI enabled drive back to a non-StoreMI drive since it tiers data across the SSD and HDD, instead of just using the SSD as a cache.
The main advantage of Optane and cache drive setups IMHO is that the PC only shows one drive. For some users who need lots of storage but don't want to manage two drives (e.g. a boot SSD and mass storage HDD), Optane can provide some value. I'd still recommend a single SSD if it's affordable though.
Another use of Optane (which wasn't available at launch) would be to have a small SSD as the boot drive, and an Optane accelerated HDD for large programs such as games that don't fit on the SSD. By having an Optane accelerated secondary drive, launching programs off that drive could be much faster. Accelerating Secondary Storage with Intel Optane Memory | PC Perspective
Optane does do a very good job of caching though compared to traditional NAND flash SSD cache drives as Optane drives can run at full performance even when they are at capacity (as is standard practice when using a cache drive).
When compared to just a HDD on it's own, the real-world performance of an Optane accelerated drive is very impressive and in real-world tests performance can be on par with an SSD: Intel Optane Memory 32GB Review - Faster Than Lightning | Client Performance (including RAID testing!)
That said, I'd still recommend:
- A single SSD if you can afford one of a high enough capacity
- A traditional SSD boot drive and large HDD if you are happy managing data on two drives
- An Optane accelerated HDD only if you really don't want to deal with two drives but still want "ssd like" performance for most tasks
A shame StoreMI isn't as good though. It's quite different than Optane technically as it uses a tiered storage architecture rather than a cache system, which is more akin to how large SAN devices work in the enterprise. More info on how tiered storage works in StoreMI here: YouTube
Does StoreMI Bring AMD on Par with Intel Optane Memory Caching? | PC Perspective
It also has the same downside as Optane as in that it only works on AMD's X399 or 400 series motherboards. It also has a major disadvantage in that you cannot easily convert an StoreMI enabled drive back to a non-StoreMI drive since it tiers data across the SSD and HDD, instead of just using the SSD as a cache.
Solitario
Well-known member
I'm asking you a question here so I don't open up another subject. The firecuda ST2000DX002 is recommended? It is to clone from my ssd the OS and use it as the main disk. Is it fast and reliable? Thank you very much in advance. Best regards.
No, I would not recommend the Firecuda at all. It's a HDD with a tiny 8GB "SSD" inside that it uses for caching, in much the same way as Optane does. However, the "SSD" inside the Firecuda drives is tiny (8GB is hardly enough to cache anything) and is poor quality.
It sounds like you already have an SSD? If you're already using an SSD, then moving to a FireCuda drive would be a huge downgrade in performance. My recommendations from my previous post still stand - an SSD or SSD and HDD combo are the best options.
It sounds like you already have an SSD? If you're already using an SSD, then moving to a FireCuda drive would be a huge downgrade in performance. My recommendations from my previous post still stand - an SSD or SSD and HDD combo are the best options.
Solitario
Well-known member
Thank you so much for your help, I don't have any more questions. Best regards.
Yeah I agree and if you can go SSD all the way, that is still your best bet.
How much installed RAM do you have? If you have less than 8GB, I would consider bumping that up first (before buying more disk space) for the most bang for your money. With an ample amount of RAM, your OS does not need to access the Page File on the drive, other files on the drive or other off-die caches as often - and that's a good thing.
Solitario
Well-known member
Well, 20GB is a huge chunk so no worries there.
Has Sysnative Forums helped you? Please consider donating to help us support the site!