Optane SSD as Boot drive - SQ Nirvana?

[n2it]

On 6/21/2018 at 1:53 PM, rando said:

A bit early for details on this one. On the face of it you have 4 x M.2 PCIe card with 6 pin power connector that has a massive heatsink covered by a graphics card shroud and fan on the other side (which should be removable).

 

The only problem with this is that it requires bifurcation support to be able to run all 4 NVMe (i.e. the bios/motherboard allows for the PCIe Gen 3 x16 to be split into 4 x4) ... so on most motherboards (except for some Intel x299 or AMD x399), this would only support 1 drive.  (Also there are some Intel z370 based that support x16 to 2 x8) 

 

As a general question, would the thoughts with the 6 pin power connector be to hook it to a linear power supply?  I get using an lps when the alternative is a cheap switching power supply, but a high quality PC power supply that has little ripple (mine has been reviewed at <10 mV at full power, and around 6 mV at normal power usage) 

 

 

 

 

[n2it]

52 minutes ago, rando said:

First off, there are numerous reasons to externally power cards and drives.  Some related to infrastructure and most related to SQ.  The 6 pin is required for full M.2 spec conformity with the amount of power they can draw.  Non-GPU x16 cards are limited to 25 watts which is less than four drives require.  Suffice to say the scope of this thread has expanded slightly beyond Optane as boot drives as the Optane lines and sizes have grown.  4 x 2TB Optane mounted as a single storage drive would not be an issue.  Most here would not put their boot drive on the same card with their storage (unless their was no impact on SQ).  So along with being light on details.  I will note this is not available and retail and was mentioned in a stagnant thread before I forget of it's existence.  For reference at a later date when it might be relevant to our needs.

 

The onus of this thread has been improvements to SQ using Optane as boot drive.  Why a linear power supply works better than even a good PC PSU has been covered many times and should be easily searchable here.  Admittedly you soon get into the point of diminishing returns in this hobby striving for always better sound.  

 

I had read the rest of the thread ... and understood where it had been and where it had gone.  A lot of the comments and thoughts in this thread resonate with me.

 

I have been looking to build a new workstation just for music and not really inspired by anything I see (at least not at the level that I want to pay).  I've been researching and can't really find anything in the price range that I am looking for that either supports bifurcation (so I can use a card like what you mention) or more than one NVMe drive.  (For me, I think the PC power supply vs LPS is at the bottom of the list for me in terms of improvements). I am not going for the x299/x399 due to cost being higher than I am willing to spend right now.  I wish the x470 or the z370/390 had more PCIe express lanes for both NVMe, and other additions (like directly connected USB, network or add-on cards to do the same) - all of the boards are focused on gaming/graphics and not the things that I'd like to see.  I was also hoping that Ryzen 2 would be better ... but it sounds like it may not be the best. 

 

I've already got an x399 with a Threadripper 1950x - which is great as there are plenty of PCIe lanes for multiple NVMe (although not separately powered, but connected directly to the CPU) - and also many direct connected USB to the CPU.  Unfortunately, I use it to run a number of VMs and other work - so I can't minimize what runs on it - and I want the VMs running at all times so I don't want to do something like dual boot.  Even so, I am running both boot and music libraries on separate NVMe drives (although not Optanes) and I do believe that it lowers the noise compared with chipset sata attached.  Seems like even if imperfect, this is probably the best system to concentrate my efforts for now.