Gadgetory

Intel obtained memory modules in spite of their tiny capacity these things do a great job of accelerating anything from boot hard drive to even something like a steam game drive only one small problem Intel only officially supports octane on its own platforms and even then only the latest ones but did you know that AMD has a competing solution called store mi store mi aims to do the same thing as obtain caching but with the added flexibility of using any SSD you want like this one or this one or this one so naturally we wondered what happens when you try and run intel design opting memory modules in a competing platform origin pcs evil 15s weighs only 4.3 pounds and features a smooth 144 Hertz 1080p display along with an NVIDIA GTX 1070 max Q graphics card check out their latest deals by clicking the link below as usual Intel's and AMD's approaches to the problem of tiered storage have a lot in common so both take the hassle of managing to separate drive letters smaller C Drive that's faster for your OS and your key programs and then a big drive for your games and media files so basically you're combining these two physical devices into one virtual one that intelligently moves the most frequently accessed data to the faster of your drives this technology is called tearing and it has a long history in enterprise storage but there are also some key differences since AMD's motherboard division doesn't have an SSD business unit breathing down their necks to sell more more caching modules store EMI can be used with any SSD TM as long as this either less than 256 gigs or you artificially limit it to 256 gigs and as long as you have an X 470 motherboard presumably so AMD can absorb the licensing cost of the third-party fused drive software AMD is a smaller software development team would be another key difference but honestly that's okay for us anyway since we're going to be using the same octane memory module for both platforms and this thing is only 32 gigs well within the limit since a my setup is pretty straightforward you pick two drives that's the maximum in the included version you assign one to the fast tier and the other to slow and then the program goes in does its thing so we'll be using the exact same method as we did for obtain testing in order to evaluate it launch six games one after the other time the load times reboot and repeat what just happened okay so the first run was slower than loading from just a hard drive but that's normal while the caching software learns but then the performance on the next run not only didn't improve it actually got worse except then when sometimes it didn't it honestly analyzing these numbers was like doing post-mortem on like what the dog had for breakfast they're scattered all over the place with in some cases no discernable pattern whatsoever I mean then to make matters worse at some point you play kicked us out for game assets violation and when we ran steams integrity checker tons of the files were missing what happened okay it's possible we dropped the hard drive who knows things happen around here so we've grabbed another one and then believer in but things got even weirder even after unti hring the drive before moving it to the other system it was not visible to the other machine other than in the UEFI BIOS Windows couldn't see it at all the only way for it to detect was by brute forcing a form out of the drive using Paragon then while investigating we hooked up a second drive back to the AMD test bench cheered then uncheered it dropped a couple files onto it move that to the second machine only to have it also not detect then we had to brute force format that to make it accessible again and then we dumped this team folder onto it and upon hooking it up to the first machine we were greeted with like a ghost of the old Drive contents and then this unexpected error preventing us from accessing it okay so TLDR if story my touches your drive you cannot access it on another machine without a full format now in phase to AMD there is a one-liner warning when you're tearing the drives up but it's still pretty frustrating with that behind us though we rebuilt a new tiered Drive and got to benching again and same thing numbers all over the place and frenetic hard drive activity to get a tick but then other reviewers were getting sense and I to work so what's the pattern here well other reviewers tested launch times back-to-back as in run one app reboot observe scaling so could that be it actually yes so when we used the same approach we finally got our octane module to work with store mi but then even then it took three or four runs to see the improvement and the results were nowhere near what we expected so then we got to thinking maybe store mi uses a more rudimentary caching algorithm that simply runs out of space on such a small caching drive that might explain the hard drive thrashing popping a Samsung 960 pro into the machine confirmed the theory performance improved 2 SSD grade by the both the second run and then even further on the third and was right up there with our Intel platform + octane so we were satisfied store my grade product actually no we were only temporarily satisfied because the untiring process took over an hour with a 12 terabyte drive and a 256 SSD so store my works but it comes with a lot of limitations unless you shall out extra money making it far from ideal and then Intel's own solution is relatively locked down so now what is there a better way perhaps we scoured the LTTE forum which you should totally nuts and found out about primo caps it comes with a 60-day trial so we gave it a shot and oh my god first of all its flexibility its head and shoulders above the other two so you can configure control and monitor multiple arrays you can actually mix partitions from different drives within the same array you can set detailed options for each of your configurations and you can even add drives to be cashed into existing arrays and furthermore it can even use part of your system memory as a super fast extra cash and it provides monitoring of key stats like cache hits and usage second of all it's non-destructive that means that what primo cache seems to be doing is copying files to the cache rather than moving them that means that uncashed is a matter of a few clicks and a few seconds of waiting since you don't have to sit there while the files recopy from your fast storage back onto your freaking slow storage and then finally there's the performance not only did it manage to be on par with the other two solutions it also made an octane cache on AMD sing the song that store mi couldn't unfortunately taking our best-case scenario on primo cache and topping it up with eight gigs of our system ram that we had to spare didn't make a noticeable difference to our testing but we're still really impressed so there you have it all three solutions can achieve similar performance so obtain works really well with platform lockdown limitations Stora my works well with some headaches not to mention platform lockdown limitations or that cheddar and primo cache works on everything with everything with no side effects that we observed but does cost $30 for a license after the first 60 days but that said you could just buy a cheaper board instead of an X 470 and then just spend that 30 bucks on a license yeah why not do that there's your conclusion Skillshare is an online learning community with thousands of classes in design business technology and more and Premium Membership gives you unlimited access to high-quality classes on must know topics so you can improve your skills unlock new opportunities and do the work you love one of our editors Taryn has been using Skillshare a ton he's done courses on logo designs mastering Adobe Illustrator and he's currently working through Duncan rogoff's mastering Adobe After Effects course Skillshare is also more affordable than most learning platforms out there an annual subscription is less than $10 a month so go check it out because since Skillshare sponsoring this video the first 500 of you to use the promo link in the description will get their first two months for nothing so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description we'll have like what it will have octane modules down there the Primo cash software maybe some big fat hard drives also down there's our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which I would say occasionally but it happens more often than you'd think teaches us as much as we teach them thanks for the tip on primo cash you guys y'all rock