Solved Stray 27 GB partition (Drive?) What to Do with this 27GB?

starchase said:

Hi @bobkn Yes I followed the Intel document that zbook included in post 11, the Intel® Optane™ Memory M Series Installation and User Guide and I did assign a drive letter in order for me to use it for a Data drive. I'm "assuming" that doing so will negate the laptop from using the drive as cache. If I need to amend my decision I certainly can do that.

EDIT: I included the wrong Intel document as the one I followed. Here is the correct one: How to Initialize Your Intel® Optane™ SSD with Windows* Disk...

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I edited my recent post above to correct the Intel document I used to initialize the Optane drive. This is the correct document: How to Initialize Your Intel® Optane™ SSD with Windows* Disk...

PerpetualCycle said:

Sounds like it. Optane is two physical drives in one package, the smallest an optane used for cache. IIRC it has a special driver that lets them work together as one virtual drive.

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Yes, the Optane in my Dell is the 32GB drive. My apologies for my stating the incorrect Intel document, I should have stated How to Initialize Your Intel® Optane™ SSD with Windows* Disk... I have initialized the drive and added a drive letter O:/ (for Optane) intending to use it as storage. But the more I read Intel's documents the less I'm enthusiastic about using the 32GB drive for either acceleration or storage.

cereberus said:

Most optane drives are fully integrated into the nvme and cannot be separated.

Whilst Optane became rather redundant as nvme drives got faster, there is still some benefit in setting it up correctly as discussed in other posts as it reduces latency access speeds.

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I still think they should at least see if it would be possible. As for using the Optane memory to reduce latency access, I doubt most users would see the difference.

starchase said:

@zbook Just to close the book, here is the SATA setting screen in the BIOS. As an FYI I'm not a big fan of RAID since I've never used it for multiple disks, but I suppose if it hasn't had any noticeable effect on performance (that I been able to discern) I should just leave the setting alone, eh?

View attachment 155987

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The earlier posts had displayed MBR preventing use of the Intel Optane.
The later posts displayed GPT enabling its use.

When a computer had its operating system on a HD it was easy to notice the benefit of the raid flash cache.
Acceleration could be enabled / disabled.

For operating systems on SSDs and the use of non-demanding applications there may be little notable difference using Optane.

See if there is a menu option for enabling / disenabling acceleration.
If there is then it can be tested while using a specific application.

zbook said:

See if there is a menu option for enabling / disenabling acceleration.
If there is then it can be tested while using a specific application.

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It's been awhile since I converted my 32GB Optane drive into a 32 GB NVMe drive so I'm not sure if it would be that easy. What I do know is that once the Optane drive was converted all I had to do was to replace it with a larger NVMe drive.

zbook said:

See if there is a menu option for enabling / disenabling acceleration.
If there is then it can be tested while using a specific application.

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There is an app for that. There doesn't look like there is a togle for engage/disengge except for reporting Notifications. Here are the pages from the app below. The Drive seems to work fine as a Data drive. But I think I'll partition the C drive to make more room for data.

The software reported not Intel optane ready with a normally functioning storage system.

There may be a member that uses optane that can comment on the reported findings.

(On a HP mobile workstation I'd used RAID / flash cache and it had made difference as the operating was on a HD. When using a SSD for everyday use the differences may not be noticed but may have benchmark differences)