Explain Intel Optane please

Ultimately if the current drive suits your usage I see no reason to change, at least you are now aware of the potential pitfalls and actions you can take to guard against them, and you are more informed on how the technology you are using works.
Should the drive capacity become an issue then I am sure a larger 'normal' NVME would be just as responsive overall, or at least quickly gotten used to, after all they are no slouches if you get the ones with dedicated DRAM cache onboard.
Intel & Micron pioneered the 3DXpoint architecture for consumer devices around 2015 - 2017, since then I believe Micron abandoned the partnership and went with a different tech solution and I am not sure Intel have released any newer Optane solutions outside of the enterprise drives since around 2018 - 2019, so once current stock is used up I don't think replacement drives could be found going forwards.
Intel's roadmap site should have more detailed information.

Hazel123 said:

So I just tried disabling it (needs a restart). And it does make a difference. It's ok without it but lightning fast with it! Hmm. I think I would miss it. Read a lot of positive things - but also the issues people have had at times.

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Do you restart your laptop enough that it would really matter? When I restart my computer the BIOS is the slowest part of the restart. Once I type in my pin it's almost instant that I'm on the desktop.

It's the difference doing tasks as well. I am only wanting to change it for more storage (1tb instead of 500gb). And yes could change it for nvme ssd. But I quite like it - as I say it's lightning fast doing basic tasks. You can buy the optane drives - a couple of places and Amazon have them


£150 elsewhere

What puts me off replacing it with another 1tb optane drive is the talk about raids and bios and issues booting at various times. As well as the higher cost. But I do think it's good! So I just need to make a decision.

I think it would work well in a recent low specced laptop like a pentium maybe, to make things speedier.

Don't forget that disabling the Optane on that drive will severely cripple performance since it is probably the only cache on the drive, also if the drive is Gen3 x2 that will also lower performance and the caching algorithms no longer play a part.
A 'normal' SSD or NVME of decent quality will have a dedicated cache as well (just not with the great low latency of Optane) and an NVME drive will most likely use Gen3 x4 (4 PCIe lanes as opposed to, I think, 2 lanes for the H10), so speed should be comparable when used in the same system.
But again, if you are happy with what you are using and would feel more comfortable getting the same in a larger capacity then do so. :)

Thanks, yes I realise that this ssd on its own, won't be as good as the samsung. There wasn't a massive difference - it just behaved like a normal computer. But I do like the lightning fast stuff. As mentioned earlier I'd like to try both for comparison but that would be unnecessarily expensive. As once the Samsung is used I can't send it back. If the computer was i7 I would just switch to a normal nvme. But it's i5 and the extra zippiness is good.

I'll stop rambling on now - just need to make a decision :)

Not sure what Intel means by this. Firstly it says copying data isn’t recommended. Then after instructions to turn off Optane before cloning, it says something about adapters could affect the cloning. Wondering exactly what this means. Does it mean if the new ssd being cloned is in an enclosure and plugged into usb?

So I had a look in my bios and nothing unusual there really. Can't see anything about raid or optane. I suspect this is just a bog standard HP Pavilion but with an optane ssd installed and the drivers.

Sorry folks - it's because it's new (to me) so fiddling about :)

Hazel, Have a read of the link here which describes what I think is what you have in your Laptop An M2 SSD with an in built Optane module which is the H10 type of SSD.


As long as you fully backup your System drive it should be possible to replace this drive with a modern standard NVME Drive and then restore the drive to the new drive.

The best way to swap the OS drive is always a case of Cloning the Old drive onto the new one - This should be possible assuming you have and empty M2 Socket on the system. Once this is complete you can wipe the H10 SSD and usit for data or applications /Games Etc

@Hazel123 I understand what you mean by the "lightning fast stuff", what I am saying is that a standard NVME (Samsung 970 Pro for example) may well prove as fast since it will have dedicated cache plus use more PCIe lanes (double the data rate in effect), so making up for the difference between Optane and non-Optane devices.
I believe Intel are playing it safe about adapters since it is possible a USB enclosure or PCI add in card could complicate matters.
The BIOS option on my system is 'Intel Premium RST + Optane', on other systems it could be something else or entirely missing as an option on a locked down BIOS such as from OEMs. You would need to see HP's support pages or forums for correct settings if swapping the current drive for a non-Optane one.
I am in no way trying to persuade you to swap drives, just explaining the tech and saying that if you did swap drives the new drive would not necessarily perform noticeably slower, as long as the replacement had onboard cache (a physical DRAM chip) and was SLC or TLC based for best performance.

My main concern about my 1 TB optane nvme drive is that its write resilience is not that brilliant. I do a lot of hyper-v vms, often 50+GB vhds, and already it has reduced to 97% (crystaldisk info) in less than a year. The 32GB optane drive has also reduced by same amount.

Ok, still got a few years of life left but none of my other ssds have reduced that fast.

So I added a second 1 TB nvme (a while back) and use that mostly for the vms and reflect backups now, and still at 100%.

So I now use optane drive for windows and static data (i.e. not continual large writes) and performance is still at 97%.

Having a second nvme really speeds up backups on my mid range laptop - my old AMD10 laptop backed up 50 GB (sata ssds) in 10 minutes. My new i7 laptop (nvme drives) backups same on 3 minutes.

cereberus said:

My main concern about my 1 TB optane nvme drive is that its write resilience is not that brilliant. I do a lot of hyper-v vms, often 50+GB vhds, and already it has reduced to 97% (crystaldisk info) in less than a year. The 32GB optane drive has also reduced by same amount.

Ok, still got a few years of life left but none of my other ssds have reduced that fast.

So I added a second 1 TB nvme (a while back) and use that mostly for the vms and reflect backups now, and still at 100%.

So I now use optane drive for windows and static data (i.e. not continual large writes) and performance is still at 97%.

Having a second nvme really speeds up backups on my mid range laptop - my old AMD10 laptop backed up 50 GB (sata ssds) in 10 minutes. My new i7 laptop (nvme drives) backups same on 3 minutes.

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That is another consideration - speed over longevity. Thanks for that. Shame I don't have a second slot. At least I don;t think I do!

Looking at the manual http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c05207097 that I believe applies to your laptop I can see that it has a slot for a conventional 2.5" HDD or SSD in addition to the M2 2280 that is used for the Optane enhanced M2 H10 SSD.

So this may be an option - replace the current M2 with a 1TB M2 SSD, and add Suitable 2.5" SSD or even 2.5" HDD

Thanks! I got quite excited there. I'm not sure this applies to my model though which is a 14-ce - I'll see if I can find the manual though.

This one says it's for HP Pavilion 14 ce0000 - so presumably covers all the ce models. It also shows a sata hard drive slot in there (although think there won't be any cable or hard drive casing). And an m2 slot and mentions some models have optane but it can only be used in the m2 slot. If it does have option to add a sata drive, that would be great, as I already have a 1tb samsung evo sata drive and could just add that for extra storage. I guess I'll find out when I take the back off. According to this manual, the ram is also replaceable, which surprised me. I am wondering how up to date this manual is though as HP have used the ce lettering for the laptops for quite a few years. But the model does look the same.

Berton said:

I'm following this as I got a new Dell Vostro 14" Notebook [with 8GB RAM and 256GB NVMe] 3 months ago with Win10 Pro then Upgraded to Win11 Pro. It appears to have Optane but it may not be active. It is quite fast with the things I do so don't know how much Optane will help.

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After my fiasco today (see my other thread about Optane) I might be able to help enlighten whether you have optane or not. If you have the Optane management software and Optane is disabled, you should see this in bios (or similar as Dell's Bios probably look different). Selecting UEFI leads to IRST which leads to (on the last photo) details of the Optane drive. Because Optane is disabled it shows as two separate drives - the Optane part and the ssd part. So does it show you have optane in the bios?

Berton said:

The only possibility I see large enough is the 16GB Recovery partition but nothing strange shows when totalling the partitions sizes. Maybe the formatting is taking about 10% of the total of 256GB??

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Update, I just used GPARTED [GNOME Partition Editor] bootable LiveUSB to verify what Win11 is showing.

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So when I had optane disabled in the app, it showed in disk management - disk 0 and disk 1. Showed up blank as windows didn't recognise the optane module as a disk but did class it as disk 0. If you don't have optane disabled in the app it will just show up as one drive.

Having nothing better to do I did a clean reinstall of Win11 and nothing about Optane shows up, apparently was just part of the Dell support features. Changed the BIOS from RAID to AHCI first and everything is fine.

Berton said:

Having nothing better to do I did a clean reinstall of Win11 and nothing about Optane shows up, apparently was just part of the Dell support features. Changed the BIOS from RAID to AHCI first and everything is fine.

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Good to hear. I think a clean install should work in my case.