 When it launched in 2017, Optane 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 Optane, we said, sorry, we're legitimately hashtag 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 terabyte steam 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, its 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's Barracuda Pro 12 terabyte hard drive, boasting a sustained transfer rate of 250 megabytes per second and a humongous 256 megabyte cache. Man, that's like the same amount of RAM as my first PC. And in the opposite corner, we've got the 3.84 terabyte PM863A SSD, coming straight out of Samsung with VNAND flash, up to 520 megabytes per second sequential reads and four gigabytes of cache. It doesn't have the best dollar per gig ratio, but this is a battle of the heavyweights. Okay, sorry, I'll stop this shtick 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 V, 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-leveled save game, with a few dozen mods 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 in For 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 Optane 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 bare 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 Optane 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're actually gonna 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 V 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 per terabyte, a combination of a Seagate hard drive and an Optane module comes down to as low as $38 per terabyte for legit SSD grade 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 Optane 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, an Optane 900P and run the whole thing in Optane 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. Humble bundle. 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 disliked 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.