Heyo,
I am considering getting myself one of those dual SSDs, where both a 1TB normal SSD and a 32GB optane drive are on the same 2280 stick, with (if the hardware supoprts it) both drives getting recognized separately.
Practicality of this aside, has anyone tried if the FW13 AMD (or another version) would support the M.2 bifurcation and allow the drive to work as intended?
Cheers
Optane is now obsolete and Intel have stopped supporting it. Just get a decent PCI-e 4th gen or higher. The H10’s are not that reliable, I’ve had several fail in customers laptops.
Its just too complicated for any worthwhile benefit in laptops. Don’t bother.
The larger enterprise Optane drives can be fun in PCs, just not laptops.
I tried on the framework 13 13gen Intel. It did not recognize the 32G optane.
This SSD use 3.0x2 and 3.0x2 seperately for the two disks. My desktop can recognize the 32G disk.
P.S. I’m using PrimoCache to manually manage the cache disk.
Only the 1T disk is recognized.
Some descriptions:
The dual controller setup on the single M.2 module makes compatibility a bit tricky, though. To use this device, the motherboard has to support bifurcation. That feature allows the PCIe 3.0 x4 device to operate on two separate PCIe 3.0 x2 links.
Ah bummer, was hoping the Framework could do that. Thanks for trying!
If you are resuing a optane drive like a H10 sometimes its best to do a secure erase so that the Intel RST in the BIOS can pick it up as two dives to then combine.
But 1. as mentioned you need a system that was designed for it and recognise it (gen 8-9 I think) and 2. the H10/H20 are crap QLC anyway.
“the Intel RST in the BIOS can pick it up as two dives to then combine.”
I don’t understand it. I checked the BIOS and there’s no RST. Even if they combine and using “cache”, you can see two disks in the device manager.
Read the second part of what I wrote.
The Framework may see the two drives (I doubt it) but it won’t combine them for cache as you need a specific generation of much older Intel based laptop to use optane. If you carry on you’ll just have two gen3x2 drives. The main one being just a less than avarage QLC based drive (running at 1500MBps rather than any Gen4 that will run at 7000MBps) that will fail in a year.
You are not doing your Framework any favours. Just don’t.
For software, I use PrimoCache. The 32G Optane SSD can significantly improve 4K RW.
According to Intel’s documentation on the mobile CPUs. The x4 Gen 4 / SSD slot is not bifurcatable at all. So it is impossible for the Intel CPUs to support such combined drivers. Desktop systems and previous systems that used it used chipset ports for that, that are pretty much always bifurcatable down to x1.
I do not think AMD has clear documentation on this, but it might be possible on a hardware level.
(AMD has 20 PCIe lanes total on their recent mobile CPUs. Some of which are bifurcatable down to x1 for WiFI etc., because it is a monolithic CPU die that also has to do chipset functionality. But I have know idea if all x4 ports these APUs support are bifurcatable. It might be that some are not as they are mostly used for SSDs or connecting a chipset when the die is reused for desktop applications).
But it would then still require firmware to handle it correctly, just like many desktop boards only got that bifurcation support added retroactively once there was a use-case the manufacturer wanted to support. And then you still need software to manage both SSDs to get an accelerated SSD out of it without making it non-bootable. This is slightly more complicated without any chipset firmware support for that acceleration like RST would.
