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Intel Optane?

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I recently bought an Optane SSD9 PCI-E. I'm using a Gigabyte ga-z77x-d3h, so it's obviously not bootable. I built a USB stick with Clover and the nvme and apfs efi drivers. I was able to install using that. Once that was done, I installed clover and the same drivers to an EFI partition on my previous sata SSD.

Net result, hackintosh loads clover from the sata SSD, which then loads OSX from the Optane. OSX doesn't seem to know any different or care.

Benchmarks in Blackmagic are over 1600MB/s. That's a little lower than rated, I suspect it's either filesystem overhead or NVMe drivers on OSX not being optimized for such a device. Overall, I'm happy with the build though. So far, only a couple days in, the daily performance is a substantial improvement over the SATA ssd. I do kind of wish I had a 960 Pro floating around to compare, but alas, I don't.
 
nhtshot said:
I recently bought an Optane SSD9 PCI-E. I'm using a Gigabyte ga-z77x-d3h, so it's obviously not bootable. I built a USB stick with Clover and the nvme and apfs efi drivers. I was able to install using that. Once that was done, I installed clover and the same drivers to an EFI partition on my previous sata SSD.

Net result, hackintosh loads clover from the sata SSD, which then loads OSX from the Optane. OSX doesn't seem to know any different or care.

Benchmarks in Blackmagic are over 1600MB/s. That's a little lower than rated, I suspect it's either filesystem overhead or NVMe drivers on OSX not being optimized for such a device. Overall, I'm happy with the build though. So far, only a couple days in, the daily performance is a substantial improvement over the SATA ssd. I do kind of wish I had a 960 Pro floating around to compare, but alas, I don't.
Click to expand...
Are you running High Sierra? I get a IONVMeFamily kernel panic every time I try to boot with my Optane 32GB plugged in. As soon as I remove it, it boots fine.
 
omegafrog said:
I to would like to know if this would work, I work on music and the sample sizes for horns and strings can be hundreds of gigs. It would be ideal to have a solid state for them but to get solid state would be out of my price range currently. If the reads of my most used files increased, how I understand optane to work, it would really speed up load times.
Did you give it a try? any updates
Click to expand...

Anyone getting this going? I am also doing music production. I have an SSD for my main drive, but samples and kontakt library takes a monster hard drive 8tb to hold and expand with over time. Trying to figure out if I can find a use for it on the hackintosh side or if adding optane is a death stroke to my dual booting music machine.

Anyone out there using optane on the hackintosh properly?
 
It's my third day trying to install high sierra in my new hackintosh. I thought to have macOS High Sierra in my Samsung 960 EVO M.2 NVME 500GB, and Windows 10 in my 2TB hard drive with my 32GB optane memory, but, if I choose AHCI in "SATA Mode Selection", I think optane memory couldn't work and I don't know if all of this is possible.

Anyone knows something about this? I can't even reach the "Select Language" screen :(
 
Setup
I have a dual system hackintosh build with two separate SSD's, one with High Sierra and one with Windows 10. I use clover boot loader to switch between the two. I have a Gigabyte z370 motherboard with the 8700k installed which would mean that Optane would work for Windows 10 with a secondary drive.

Experiment
I wanted to use Optane Memory to speed my mechanical 2TB drive only under Windows. Now this works really good, I got performance increases that come close to an SSD. The problem is that you need RST to be able to use Optane and this means that AHCI is disabled. Without AHCI enabled MacOS will not boot.

I decided to make two bios profiles one with AHCI and one with RST so I could switch bios profiles and boot Windows with Optane and MacOS High Sierra without. Unfortunately, this did not work either. High Sierra would not boot when the Optane memory card was screwed in, even when I went back to my initials setup where everything worked (Windows and OS X), the card would cause a kernel panic when booting High Sierra.

Conclusion
As soon as the Optane card was screwed in to the m2 slot (AHCI still enabled) I could not boot into High Sierra anymore. After removing it I could boot again. For me to use Optane in Windows I would have to screw it in and switch AHCI to RST. To use High Sierra I would have to unscrew the card and enable AHCI. That is too much work for me.

Hope this helps!
 
Hi!
I have the same problem with Optane memory. I use it with Windows but I do not want to use it in hackintosh. From the BIOS I change the RST mode to AHCI when I want to change the operating system (no problem), but since Optane memory is installed, High Sierra does not start, and if I remove it from the connector the system starts correctly. Does anyone know if it is possible to disable the nvram m.2 connector from Clover? this would be a solution.
 
There´s 2 ways to use Intel Optane NVMe 16/32GB.

Intel designed the Optane 16/32GB NVMe as a RAID Cache, instead of RAID 0 "Faster", Raid 1 "Safer", RAID 1+0 "Safer&Faster", Raid 3,5,etc...
its a New Class.
only works with intel 7th Gen CPUs or better, that have in the Bios a hidden RAID menu when Intel Optane 16/32GB is detected.
Also Needs DRIVERS, like a Normal RAID, Intel Only makes Drivers for Windows, also Drivers are only for Windows10 last time i checked.
https://downloadcenter.intel.com/product/35125/Memory-and-Storage

thats an effort from Intel / Microsoft to accelerate Windows8.1x64 obsolecense,
AMD also Does Not make Drivers for Windows8.1x64 RX 580 was the latest card.

that was the reasons i moved to OSX, i like Windows8.1 but i don Not like W10,
Windows also has programmed obsolecense so there is No reason to stay in Windows.
BUT...
when i was using Windows8.1 "No RAID Drivers" the Optane 16/32GB NVMe could be formatted as a NTFS Drive...
and the \TEMP folders, and the PageFile.sys aka. VirtualRAM could be moved to the Optane Memory, increasing speed of some things to incredible levels.--
but PageFile.sys maximum file size could Not be more than 50% the NVMe or becomes slower.
Chip memory Needs to Scrub/Refresh the Bits constantly, all SSD`s are like that, most SSD have a 1GB Cache, but Not for increasing speed like old HDDs, its to Refresh/Scrub all the Memory constantly, Reading & Writing "moving the data" to keep it fresh.
thats why some SSDs like Samsung have a software "Magician" with an option that can be enabled to use 1GB or 2GB of computer RAM as SSD Cache to increase speed.
i think, latest AMD boards also have that technology, that works with any SATA drive.

Using AMD / DataRAM RamDisk/RamDrive software and moving the PageFile.sys does Not work, because Windows load 1st the PageFile, THEN loads the RAMDrive drivers, having the PageFile in a RAMDrive becomes a Paradox and Fails, there is No easy way to change Windows Drivers Boot Order.

Also i had Windows Superfetch Disabled, that means Windows will Not automatically load all the most common softwares i use, so the HDD LED does Not blink for long periods of time when i Boot Windows.
= No Cheat.
i opened Opera or Firefox or Chrome with many pinned Tabs different websites, it takes alot of effort & memory to load lots of tabs.
i closed Opera waited 1 munute o 5 minutes, and opened again, Opens Instantly, things that are in the VirtualRam opens instantly, you can see the differente between the HDD & Virtual RAM, its incredible.

intel Optane NVMe has the same speed as the fastest Biggest NVMe drives from Samsung, at lower price & lower cappacity,
its designed to give maximum performance with smaller file sizes.
easy to see with HDTune for example, how file size affects the performance/speed of the drive.
speed is Not the same moving big files vs. small files.
Optane is very fast moving small files, thats the trick, as fast as the fastest biggest drives costing lots more.

a 16GB Optane can be used max with a 8GB VM file...
a 32Gb with 16GB capacity.

OSX also has a \Private\VAR\VM folder,
and a config file that can be changed.

but Drivers for NVMe does not seem to work.
http://www.macvidcards.com/nvme-driver.html
https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/os-x-driver-for-nvme-m-2-solid-state-drives-released.181387/
http://www.patentlyapple.com/patent...optane-memory-in-next-gen-macs-this-year.html

somewhere says that HighSierra includes Apple NVMe Drivers, i dont know i have Sierra.
but also somewhere says that HighSierra Update does Not create \VM folder.
= is slower, and needs a Clean install.

my OSX has a 1,07GB VM file, if i could move that to the Optane, OSX will fly. LOL.
im using a Startech PCIe x4 M.2 adatper, but the ASRock Quad M.2 PCIe x16 looks interesting.

Mac-Pro:~ $ vm_stat
Mach Virtual Memory Statistics: (page size of 4096 bytes)
Pages free: 18553.
Pages active: 299079.
Pages inactive: 279416.
Pages speculative: 408.
Pages throttled: 0.
Pages wired down: 156495.
Pages purgeable: 140.
"Translation faults": 12473508.
Pages copy-on-write: 630921.
Pages zero filled: 5204150.
Pages reactivated: 3482607.
Pages purged: 10803.
File-backed pages: 170686.
Anonymous pages: 408217.
Pages stored in compressor: 711639.
Pages occupied by compressor: 292475.
Decompressions: 1869859.
Compressions: 3224094.
Pageins: 732299.
Pageouts: 4320.
Swapins: 47859.
Swapouts: 66978.
 
Last edited:
Markfx said:
Setup
I have a dual system hackintosh build with two separate SSD's, one with High Sierra and one with Windows 10. I use clover boot loader to switch between the two. I have a Gigabyte z370 motherboard with the 8700k installed which would mean that Optane would work for Windows 10 with a secondary drive.

Experiment
I wanted to use Optane Memory to speed my mechanical 2TB drive only under Windows. Now this works really good, I got performance increases that come close to an SSD. The problem is that you need RST to be able to use Optane and this means that AHCI is disabled. Without AHCI enabled MacOS will not boot.

I decided to make two bios profiles one with AHCI and one with RST so I could switch bios profiles and boot Windows with Optane and MacOS High Sierra without. Unfortunately, this did not work either. High Sierra would not boot when the Optane memory card was screwed in, even when I went back to my initials setup where everything worked (Windows and OS X), the card would cause a kernel panic when booting High Sierra.

Conclusion
As soon as the Optane card was screwed in to the m2 slot (AHCI still enabled) I could not boot into High Sierra anymore. After removing it I could boot again. For me to use Optane in Windows I would have to screw it in and switch AHCI to RST. To use High Sierra I would have to unscrew the card and enable AHCI. That is too much work for me.

Hope this helps!
Click to expand...

I have finally found a method to boot Hackintosh while Optane is connected to the motherboard. This method only allows to boot MacOS, but it does not make Optane work in it (I have tested on High Sierra).
1) If we have Optane activated in Windows as an HDD cache, we first deactivate it (otherwise we can lose data).
2) Change the mode of the motherboard from RST to AHCI.
3) In Clover, put the following in boot arguments: nvme=-1
 
@langostinni2 Any recent luck with optane?

I would be super nice to buy one to set as a swap partition since macOS does loves to swap a lot.
 
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