IntelMEMPEK1W016GAXT 16 GB PCI Express M.2 2280 Internal Flash Accelerator - Black

Intel Optane made my PC lightning fast. I have Windows 10 (64 bit) installed on an SSHD hybrid drive. Because the hybrid drives are faster than ordinary hard drives I didn't expect much improvement with Optane. However, I am truly surprised at how fast Windows 10 now boots, it's almost instant. Also other startup programs now load at boot time almost instantly too. Only down side was that I had a dual boot system with Ubuntu on a second hard drive. After installing Optane, Ubuntu disappeared. To be fair Intel do warn about adverse side effects of installing Optane on a dual boot system. Apart from the dual boot OS factor, Optane is a real performance boost for the whole system, and a lot cheaper than buying an SSD. It's easy to install the Optane card too. Intel have anOptane card video install how-to on their site, which I found the easiest to follow (much easier than wading through the pdf written install how-to). Just make sure your PC meets all the minimum requirements for Optane (also listed on Intel's site), and follow the instructions to the letter. Remember to backup any data on any additional OS you have installed (in a dual boot system) before installing Optane.

This was very close to being a 1-star review, in fact I'd started writing it a couple of days ago. Intel didn't advertise that the module would only speed up the boot drive of a system, rendering it pretty useless to a large proportion of potential users. The normal use case for such a device would be in a system with a small SSD boot drive and a large mechanical secondary drive which could do with the acceleration.But as of today they finally released v16 of the Optane/RST drives enabling secondary drive acceleration. In my particular build, it makes quite a bit of difference. Whilst the write speed is pretty much as it was, the read speed has increased from 120MB/s to around 900MB/s. Games load almost instantly (after they've made it into the cache). Be aware though that this semi-permanently pairs with one of your drives and if either the device or drive goes, you lose your data. I don't foresee this being a particular problem though as the device montiors itself for issues and will warn if anything untoward is happening, giving you a chance to disable it.Overall, a very nice bit of kit.

Damn was this thing a pain in the ass to setup, It works as it is supposed to and is amazing, but you have to have some patience as you may have to fiddle around with a few settings in the computers bios.The setup took forever and that's why i'm giving it 3 stars.

This was installed in my spare M.2 slot on my motherboard very easily. On first installation I suspected it was this wee card that was making my machine crash every now and then. So I left it out for a few weeks, until I noticed that there were reports on the NET that the drivers could cause stability issues.However, there were also reports that the drivers on the BIOS of my ASUS ROG Maximus 10 could also cause stability issues. So I deduced that maybe the BIOS did not like the drivers for the OPTANE drive. So I updated the BIOS and the INTEL drivers at the same time and I have never experienced another crash since.Is this card worth the expense? Well I am not connecting to the OS HD and I suspect that people would notice a big speed improvment if it was. I am actually conecting it to a 8TB HDD, and if you play the same game, the OPTANE drive certainly speeds up the load time. I.e Elite dangerous to the menus screen in 15 seconds without the OPTANE and 9 seconds with it on.UPDATE: It turns out that the instability of my machine started again.After about three days of analysis I found the cause.First the symptoms:I have a water cooled loop in my computer, and usually the temperature of the CPU was always within 5 to 8 degrees C above the water. But suddenly this jumped between 12 and 15.I eventually found that Windows explorer was using 10 to 20 percent CPU, hence using circa double the watts on idle which then led to the temps going up. It took me ages to find out why, but here it is.Intel OPTANE Memory PINNING for Windows!Ironically, this is only useful when accelerating an HDD OS drive with OPTANE, and I am not.So why the hell is it running as a service, severely impeding my new build when I am not even needing it. C'mon Intel, this is very sloppy! Since the excessive Windows Explorer CPU problem seems to be very common on the net, probably caused by many factors, how many machines are affected with the OPTANE specific problem, with all the frustration that goes with it I wonder. I did not find any other mention of the OPTANE memory Pinning issue on the NET for this.So uninstalling 'Intel OPTANE Memory PINNING for Window's and BINGO! All is back to normal.

I'd been meaning to give AMD's StoreMI software a try and wanted to play with a cheap Optane module in order to do so.I ordered the 16GB model to pair with my 120GB KingDian SSD on my Gigabyte Aorus X470 Ultra Gaming motherboard, popped it in the NVME slot and set up StoreMi in Windows 10 Professional. At this point, both drives were fused into a single C: drive in Windows and I left StoreMI software to learn my application launch habits to enhance my most used applications.You can see the increase in read speeds on the CrystalDiskMark screenshots throughout vs the SATA drive on its own but, some of the write speeds were lower due to the lesser write speeds of the Optane unit vs the KingDian.On top of the enhanced reads of the Optane unit alone, you can also allocate 2GB of your system RAM to further increase performance which is shown on the third screenshot.Overall, boot times are quicker, application load times are even faster and the system seems as fluid and responsive as ever.Pleased with the result and no regrets in experimenting. I can imagine things are even better when an Optane unit is paired with a standard hard drive.For those who want to utlilise an unused NVME slot and to speed up an existing drive, this is worth considering.