 Intel Optane memory modules. In spite of their tiny capacity, these things do a great job of accelerating anything from a boot hard drive to even something like a Steam game drive, only one small problem. Intel only officially supports Optane on its own platforms and even then, only the latest ones. But did you know that AMD has a competing solution called StoreMI? StoreMI aims to do the same thing as Optane 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 designed Optane memory modules in a competing platform? Let's find out. Let's find out. Let's find out. Let's find out. Let's find out. Let's find out. Origin PC's EVO 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 two separate drive letters, a smaller C drive that's faster for your OS and your key programs, and then a big D 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 tiering 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 MI can be used with any SSD, TM, as long as it's either less than 256 gigs or you artificially limit it to 256 gigs and as long as you have an X470 motherboard. Presumably so AMD can absorb the licensing cost of the third-party fuse drive software. AMD's smaller software development team would be another key difference. But honestly, that's okay for us anyway, since we're gonna be using the same Optane memory module for both platforms and this thing is only 32 gigs, well within the limit. Sentomai 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 and does its thing. So we'll be using the exact same method as we did for Optane 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. Honestly, analyzing these numbers was like doing postmortem on like what the dog had for breakfast. They're scattered all over the place with in some cases no discernible pattern whatsoever. I mean, then to make matters worse, at some point Uplay kicked us out for game assets violation. And when we ran Steam's integrity checker, tons of the files were missing. Like what happened? Okay, it's possible we dropped the hard drive. Who knows, things happen around here. So we grabbed another one. And then believe it or not, things got even weirder. Even after un-tearing 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 format of the drive using Paragon. Then while investigating, we hooked up a second drive back to the AMD test bench, tiered, then un-tiered it, dropped a couple files onto it, moved 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 the Steam 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. So, okay, so TLDR. If store MI touches your drive, you cannot access it on another machine without a full format. Now in fairness 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 tier drive and got to benching again. And same thing, numbers all over the place and frenetic hard drive activity, tickety, tickety, tick. But then other reviewers were getting sense MI 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 Optane module to work with store MI. But 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 to SSD grade by about the second run and then even further on the third and was right up there with our Intel platform plus Optane. So we were satisfied. Store MI, great product. Actually, no, we were only temporarily satisfied because the un-tiering process took over an hour with a 12 terabyte drive and a 256 SSD. So store MI works, but it comes with a lot of limitations unless you shallowed 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 LTT forum, which you should totally join BT dubs and found out about PrimoCache. It comes with a 16 day trial. So we gave it a shot and oh my God. First of all, its flexibility is 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 cached into existing arrays. And furthermore, it can even use part of your system memory as a super fast extra cache. And it provides monitoring of key stats like cache hits and usage. Second of all, it's non-destructive. That means that what PrimoCache seems to be doing is copying files to the cache rather than moving them. That means that uncaching 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 Optane cache on AMD sing the song that StoreMI couldn't. Unfortunately, taking our best case scenario on PrimoCache 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 Optane works really well with platform lockdown limitations. StoreMI works well with some headaches, not to mention platform lockdown limitations or that cheddar. And PrimoCache works on everything with everything with no side effects that we observed, but does cost $30 for a license after the first 60 days. With that said, you could just buy a cheaper board instead of an X470 and then just spend that 30 bucks on a license. Yeah, why not do that? There's your conclusion. 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If you disliked 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 are we gonna have? Optane modules down there, the PrimoCache software, maybe some big fat hard drives. Also down there is 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 PrimoCache, you guys. Y'all rock.