AMD StoreMI – The Best Feature of Ryzen Gen 2?
Peter Donnell / 6 months ago
StoreMI
If you’ve been keeping an eye on eTeknix.com, you’ll know that we recently reviewed the Ryzen 5 2600X and the 2700X. However, this week we got to take a look at the non-X parts of the new Ryzen CPUs, the R7 2700 and R5 2600, which offer amazing performance and value, as well as a much lower TDP. AMD we’re awesome enough to include a brand new Samsung M.2 SSD and a Western Digital Blue HDD too, allowing us to tinker with their new StoreMI technology on our Ryzen testbench.
StoreMI is one of the biggest yet least talked about features of the AMD 400 series chipset. That’s right, it’s only on the new motherboards, unfortunately, but with the Ryzen R7 2700 and the Gigabyte X470 motherboard on our test bench right now, that’s not a problem for us. Basically, you can take a stupidly fast SSD and a big capacity HDD and StoreMI will merge them as if they’re one drive! That way you get super speed and massive storage.
StoreMI Features
Spend Less Time Waiting
High-capacity hard drives are great for storing large libraries, but they’re much slower than an SSD. AMD StoreMI technology can get those files running at up to SSD-like speeds. Simply add an SSD to your system, and let StoreMI do the rest.
Accelerate Your Operating System
Feeling the pain of slow startup times or an unresponsive PC? AMD StoreMI technology can help. Just add an SSD, and StoreMI can automatically help your PC feel smooth and snappy.
Cost-Effective, Non-Proprietary Hardware
You don’t need to invest in expensive and proprietary hardware to get quicker storage performance. AMD StoreMI uses widespread and affordable technologies, like SSDs and NVMe, to accelerate the storage you already have.
Plug & Play for Easy Setup Today
You don’t need to reinstall Windows® to enjoy the benefits of AMD StoreMI technology. Just add faster storage devices to your system, and StoreMI will automatically get your most-used data to the fastest drive for peak performance.
Easily Manage Large Libraries
PC enthusiasts often have many large hard drives for their library of files, but managing the library across multiple drives can be a nuisance. AMD StoreMI technology can make it a whole lot easier by managing those drives as a single large pool.
Hard Drive Specifications
What AMD Had to Say
“SSDs are fast, but expensive, and offer minimal capacity. Mechanical hard drives boast large capacity for a low price, but are much slower than an SSD. AMD StoreMI technology “combines” these two types of storage into a single drive and automatically moves the data you access the most to the SSD, so you get the best of both worlds: SSD responsiveness, and mechanical hard disk capacity with its low price.” – AMD
What’s in the Box
The Western Digital Blue 2 TB HDD and the Samsung 860 Evo SATA M.2 SSD were provided. However, pretty much any SSD, M.2 and HDD combination will work fine, so long as you have one for speed and one for capacity. Two identical drives wouldn’t work; you would be better off running them in a traditional RAID format.
So… like Intel’s Rapid Storage Technology (RST) which was introduced around 2011, I think?
C’mon AMD I like you guys but jeez this ain’t new! SSHD anyone?
It’s quite a bit different. Yes, the basic idea isn’t new. Intel has done it with their Smart Response and there are other third-party apps for it too. But none has done it like this so far. AMD offers NVMe support AND RAM disk on top. Right now it’s a bit limited, but the capacity limitations will be removed soon. So, combine 32GB RAM, the fastest NVMe drive and the largest HDD you can find and get something quite unique. Just saying. Don’t diss something because it looks similar on the surface … it’s the underlying technology that counts.
No.. This isn’t new at all. but you got a very wrong idea about StoreMI.
RST is NOT StoreMI, not even Optane. This technique is called Storage Tiering. Microsoft Windows Server offered this, but you get the price. Large SAN servers offered this, but that also cost you arm and leg, perhaps both. So, this technology was supposed to cost you some 70 grand. IBM guy offered me their same product for some $170,000. Yes.. you read that right
It is based on machine learning, and will move files back and forth between tiers. Well, not files per se, but blocks, or for average joe, sectors. It is more akin to RAID than RST, and was poised as RAID replacement years ago. No doubt, that is is MUCH MUCH more efficient, and easier to replicate than RAID setup. All data in SATA and RAMdisk are active blocks, and will be synchronized more frequently to mirror server, while all blocks in HDD will be synchronized less frequently. That will make a fail over much more efficient.
The truth with tiering system such as StoreMI, is that you will never write to SSD or much less HDD. Perhaps never write to HDD. Only StoreMI software writes to HDD (i.e. relocating blocks, and remapping storage layout, then updating virtual storage layout that will be read by OS) SSD will be written only when RAMDisk is out of space. While the system idle, it will recalculate its statistics, and if SSD has almost run out of space, it will relocate months old data out to HDD. While on Intel, RST will always write the data to HDD, and flush the cache.
In short, Storage tiering is permanent store, while RST is not. Storage tiering is more akin to very intelligent RAID, while RST is large cache.
For example, your favorite spreadsheet writes to sector 20000 of your storage. little does OS know, that sector 20000 lies on a RAM Disk. After a few months, you open that same spreadsheet, and OS took it from sector 20000. But this time, sector 20000 comes from an SSD. So you see, that software tiering maintains a virtual store that maps to physical address location across multiple storage devices between network, RAM, HDD, SSD, and many many other type of storage that make up its list, and OS only read a sector. So, this is a storage virtualization, and OS runs on top of Virtual storage.