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MNS1968

Member

Registered: 2023-12-28

Posts: 29

Intel Optane M.2 PCIe drive - Possible to use or not?

Greetings all, silly question,

I've been offered a small capacity Intel Optane M.2 PCIe drive at low price which is apparently in good health and was tested using CrystalDiskMark. I only want it for backup storage of documents and receipts which currently total 3.1GB and it's certainly not ever going to be used as a boot drive.

Looking around I see there are some issues like these drives cannot be used in RAID (I don't use RAID) and the BIOS needs to be to AHCI which it already is on my ASRock board. Some online posts say they cannot be used on Linux, while others like phoronix.com say they can be ...just not with the intended speeds or the Microsoft caching features. Reading the Arch Wiki, I cannot find any reason why it can't be used.

I'm wondering has anyone else been using an Intel Optane M.2 drive on their Arch system or are they really too much bother?

cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 2,263

Re: Intel Optane M.2 PCIe drive - Possible to use or not?

optane are not designed as regular data storage and hence are not a good option for long time archival
in fact: as for an "backup" i wouldn't trust ANY single-drive solution but would ALWAYS go some form of raid - either a simple (triple-)mirror or a raid6 - depending on requirements - and don't use solid-state storage but spinning rust

even better: sounds like most of your data is text anyway: print it! just do it! and care for PROPER storage

seth

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From: Won't reply 2 private help req

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 76,886

Re: Intel Optane M.2 PCIe drive - Possible to use or not?

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Solid_ … l/Solidigm
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Advanced_Format#Intel
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Laptop … de_to_AHCI

Printing 3.4GB text sounds like one would have to slaughter a lot of trees for that
Backups need to be physically detached from the master (ideally not even in the same building) and the safe approach is to have multiple copies and (because chances that all of them degrade at the same time dissolve quickly) and copy away from the degrading media. Long-term archives on glass discs is usually unattainable.

NAND tends to hold data quite well, the risk is silently failing writes and loss of the controller.
Magnetic discs have less trouble w/ the controller but need to be EM shielded and spun up once in a while (as a matter of fact: frequently rewriting the data is the better strategy, completely the opposite of NAND cells)

Backups can be performed on RAIDs but there's limited benefit (it's effectively a way to have partial copies, but introduces the raid controller as point of failure) but more importantly RAIDS ARE NOT BACKUPS!
A raid can protect against immediate media failure but does shit about immediate brain-to-finger failure ("I didn't mean to type that rm command") or your house burning down/notebook being stolen/…

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cryptearth

Member

Registered: 2024-02-03

Posts: 2,263

Re: Intel Optane M.2 PCIe drive - Possible to use or not?

well - given the amount of paper still floating around in my workplace which introduced "paperless workplace" years ago - cutting down a few logs doesn't sound that big of a problem - but rather the "ink" required to get the information onto the paper (which, depending on type used comes with its own caveats)

as for "raid is not a backup" - yes, i do agree with that - but a backup target should be redundant in itself - relying on just one drive is the real pitfall (hence i pointed out at least a 3-way mirror or a raid6 as a backup target)
my point was to say: "your backup target should be a raid" - not: "just use a raid"
and of course: the backup target should only be up and mounted during an actual backup - having a "backup" mounted all the time doesn't protect against a wild "rm -rf" either (and, from the news, is how several companies lost thier backups to ransomware or even too greedy ai bots)

btw: as for printing 3gb of text: given how much a tape drive cost (even used) plus the tape ... hm ... sound like an interesting math question