Optane 900P test / burn in / burning in - what do you use?

[petreza]

Just go my first Optane - 900P 280GB (U.2-->M.2 cable) for ZIL/SLOG for my first ZFS attempt. I will partition the drive for two separate SLOGs a few GB each and will use the rest of the drive for something else.

Before I do that I want to somehow test/burn in the drive. The system is based on Supermicro X11DPG-QT and XEONs Silver. Right now I only have Ultimate Boot CD on a USB stick running MemTest86+ to burn in the memory. Can I use any of the utilities there? If not what would you recommend?

Thanks!

 

[marcoi]

I think most will say live boot or install linux and run FIO type benchmarks. DD will also work I believe.
Not an expert on either but there are a lot of examples of both online you can search for. That is what I usually do when testing storage. Sometimes i will also install W10 and use Crystal Disk Mark for quick testing.

 

[petreza]

Thanks! I'll check how to do that.

Attached is the schematic of the motherboard. It has 6 PCIe 16x slots which consume all 96 PCIe "normal" lanes from the CPUs. The M.2 slot is attached through the PCH chip. Will this slow down the 900P considerably in throughput or increase the latency?
If so, I am considering to moving it to the 7th PCIe slot which is 4x (in 8x slot) attached to CPU2 through "DMI". Would that be any better? Should I instead get one of those $60-$100 cards that split a 16x slot into 4 M.2 ports (the mobo supports bifurcation)? Or better yet, are there any cards that do 16x slot to 4 ports for U.2?
(edit: found one from Supermicro (approx. $120): AOC-SLG3-4E4T that uses OCuLink SFF-8611 (x4) to U.2 SFF-8639 (approx. $15))

Thanks!

 

[BackupProphet]

The way I partition my Optane drive is 1-4GB SLOG, 1GB slog is enough for spinning drives while 4GB seems to be good for SSD's. If you have an enormous amount of sync writes to fast SSD's, increasing the slog size up to 6-8GB may be worth it.

I also create a 8-16GB partition that I add as swap, this can make a huge difference.
The rest I add to the L2ARC.