Gadgetory

when it launched in 2017 obtain memory this little module here was positioned as enabling SSD like performance on a hard drive but only for a boot drive a significant limitation because the supported motherboards were so new that it was likely they'd already be running an SSD for their OS anyway so the technology worked well but the value proposition for enthusiasts like me in particular was a little tough to find which is why when Intel reached out about doing a sponsored video on octane we said sorry we're legitimately hash tag out of ideas unless you guys could add support for accelerating like a secondary game drive or something well funny story they did it so we made a lightning fast 12 terabytes team drive on the cheap all right so for the uninitiated 3d crosspoint is a non-volatile memory technology jointly developed by Intel and micron what makes it different from the NAND flash that you'd find in a typical SSD is it's much higher endurance that is how many times you can write to it and it's much lower latency with a price that's comfortably in between RAM and NAND flash so the idea here is that even though our 32 gigabyte module is only 0.2% of the capacity of our 12 terabyte drive here it's read speeds and in particular its access latency should give even a really large storage drive like this SSD like performance because the files that need to get accessed all the time aren't actually that big so as a baseline then we're gonna start by testing game loading times off of two standalone drives a hard drive and a high capacity SSD in this corner we've got Seagate Barracuda Pro 12 terabyte hard drive boosting a sustain transfer rate of 250 megabytes per second and a humongous 256 megabytes card that's like the same amount of RAM is my first pc and in the opposite corner we've got the 3.8 4 terabytes p.m. 863 a SSD coming straight at us and some with v9 flash up to 520 megabytes per second sequential reads and 4 gigabytes of cache it doesn't have the best dollar per gig ratio but this is a battle all the heavy way okay sorry I'll stop this stick now before starting our tests we picked a handful of games that would be impractical to store on a dedicated SSD unless you're a mega baller GTA 5 fallout 4 witcher 3 and Deus Ex they all take up a ton of space then we maxed out the in-game graphics settings and loaded a pre levelled saved game with a few dozen logs loaded into Skyrim to simulate a more realistic scenario for anyone who's still playing Skyrim we used Assassin's Creed origins discovery mode load times and the first level of the campaign infer honor each set was run three times with reboots in between we also did three back-to-back sets with the hard drive without rebooting to see what effect its huge cache would have so we didn't see anything unexpected overall but what was cool was that the large cache built right into this drive does seem to have an effect on its loading times in some of the titles as long as the system doesn't get rebooted in between this could be a really good sign for our opting accelerated drive because unlike a cache built into the drive the data stays on it in between boots and with the exception of Witcher 3 and for honor the load times of our combined solution tanked below that of a bear hard drive but there's nothing unexpected here like accelerating a boot drive it's the nature of the caching beast that before it's had a chance to analyze the data it'll perform the same or maybe even worse so let's give this a reboot and do it again interesting so as it turns out it only took a second run for our hard drive octane combo to drop its loading times in every title except for Witcher 3 to the same or faster levels than a regular SSD so we are actually going to have to reboot one more time and see if this continues during our third run the already impressive results stayed about the same with Assassin's Creed dropping below SSD level load times and then even GTA 5 showing a slight improvement so this is really cool we can see a couple of things at play here so first of all the cache is working second it does work across reboots and third there is a big advantage to running it like this over even just having a bigger DRAM cache on your hard drive because it's so big it can hold enough data to cache multiple modern titles so even if you're not the kind of person who just plays the same couple of games over and over you can still benefit from it but will every gamer benefit so we did a few more runs with reboots in between in order to find out and we found some interesting things here some games continue to improve and actually widen their gap from a dedicated SSD while some games don't scale at all so how about the value proposition then well while your typical SATA SSD from a reputable brand comes in at about 300 dollars per terabyte a combination of a Seagate hard drive and an obtain module comes down to as low as $38 per terabyte for legit SSD great performance at least in all of the tests that we ran this is somewhat offset by the fact that accelerating a second Drive requires an eighth gen Intel Core processor and 300 series chipset as opposed to seventh gen and 200 series for primary drive acceleration but it is something for anyone who is running that platform to keep in mind so thanks Intel for allowing data drive caching now I can go back to the satisfying sound of hard drive clickety clicks without giving up speed this is something that I have been asking for since obtain launched I even asked about it when I attended the pre-launch briefing because it makes so much more sense for enthusiasts because for your OS you can buy a full-blown SSD or if you're that hardcore obtain 900p and run the whole thing in obtain rather than using caching but it's just not cost-effective for a game drive where you can easily have multiple terabytes of files that you only access once in a while or in some cases never humblebundle sorry excuse me it's also worth noting that aside from games file search times improved though with that said I'm not sure if I would get one of our writers to use my photo library as a test case for this next time around so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one I'm not sure if this one will still be there it's limited edition but also linked in the video description is our community forum which you should totally join