2100 NVMe Optane SSD over mPCIE adapter Questions

[JonathanLee]

Hello fellow Netgate community members,

can you please help?

I am trying to get my Intel Optane drive to work correctly for a swap partition.

Here is what I have done so far, I originally had the NVMe drive in a usb adapter for swap so I labeled it as swapUSB and had it formatted and partitioned.

I got my mPCIE adapter today and moved the drive over and it works I now get the 5gbps port again the drive can max out now for speed faster than USB2.0 speeds.

Here is what I am seeing, do I need to reformat the drive? I want to use the Optane memory it is a h10 with 16GB Optane Memory and 256 SSD.

Do I need to reformat this? Do I need to do anything else?

Do I need to run gpart again or do it with nvmecontrol commands?

I want to use that 16GBs bad

[JonathanLee]

I think nda0 is already the nvme drive but the 16 GB Octane volatile memory is what I want to mimic as SSD and utilize it with .eli

[patient0]

@JonathanLee interesting how you push the limits of the stuff you use :) ... I can't help much with Intel Optane except what the internet is telling me (and I found a FreeBSD thread which you found too).

Searching the net suggests that the motherboard/chipset and BIOS has to support it to work. And if they do it would show up as two NVMe devices (when not configured as Optane drive). Additionally the host system has to support PCIe port bifurcation (which the 2100 may does).

Anandtech has a review :"The Intel Optane Memory H10 Review: QLC and Optane In One SSD" including a table with "Platform Compatibility", little confidence that it will work in an ARM based device.

[JonathanLee]

@patient0 I got mpcie to m.2 by an adapter internally thanks to a recommendation from the forum

[patient0]

@JonathanLee said in 2100 NVMe Optane SSD over mPCIE adapter Questions:

I got mpcie to m.2 by an adapter internally

Sure, I did follow your swap journey . But does that adapter support PCIe port bifurcation?

[JonathanLee]

@patient0

max x2 lanes on the PCIe ...

[JonathanLee]

@patient0 The swap journey with the correct use of labels resulted it it working as soon as I moved it to the mpcie adapter again I think I need nvmecontrol commands to format it again so I can get to the Optane memory. I have no clue how to do that, I use to use fdisk in dos 3.11 so using something outside of gpart or fdisk etc. is very new to me, I assume that the nvmecontrol has format specific commands to use to get access to the Optane memory but who knows right, fun stuff I love stuff like this, I was thinking Intel might also have a label that is specific to using the Optane for a swap, pfsense I learned has the use of swapX X=some number and the software uses it, so maybe if I use a label the Optane controller will pick it up and use it.