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[Experiment] Using a cheap Intel Optane as a swap partition

2026-07-18 02:45 UTC

So, a quick review of an experiment I ran this week. (I also posted this at the brazilian Linux community) Since RAM prices are VERY high, I wondered if Intel's Optane memory would be a good intermediate substitute between my SSD (a WD Green that doesn't even hit 150 MB/s on btrfs with LUKS) and having more RAM. I did some research and saw the prices were very low, so why not buy one? Basically, the 16GB M10 modules are the Optane-only ones, so technically they would be good for this kind of task. It arrived, I installed it on the motherboard, partitioned it as a swap space, added it to fstab, and the 13.4 GiB of swap was there, with zswap configured using zswap.max_pool_percent=90 zswap.accept_threshold_percent=95, and zstd as the compression algorithm. The machine is running Artix with XFCE, a Xeon E5 2667 v4 CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and an RTX 3050 6GB. I decided to play Victoria 3, and it was smooth. I also compiled a few Java projects, it ran smoothly as well. Then, since I didn't have anything more intimidating for my RAM, I downloaded an open LLM model to test the memory pressure, just the file size is larger than my combined VRAM + RAM, and it was the Qwen-AgentWorld-35B-A3B-UD-Q4_K_S. It ran smoothly. Then I played a video in FreeTube and opened LibreWolf, asked it some questions, and it handled the token generation at 20 tk/s in llama.cpp without any issues. It had occasional slight hiccups (much smaller than when the swap was on my SSD), but considering I was using all of that (as shown in the image) as swap space, I think it honestly withstood the memory pressure. I tested again with lz4 as the compression algorithm and got an OOM when loading the model, so every bit of compression seems to matter as well. So, I think it might be worth it for anyone who has a swap file on a entry level SATA SSD or an HDD, it's a good middle ground. But if you have an expensive NVME SSD, then idk if it's very worthwhile. I did notice a good improvement in the PC. I don't think it was that useful, but at this price, it's basically free performance.

Replies (3)

  • @umbrella@lemmy.ml 2026-07-18 03:13

    it’s cool that you can even do that. i have a spare m2 slot and i found it for basically free too. i have zero need for that but i might just do this.

    Open ##3901316

  • @luthis@lemmy.nz 2026-07-18 03:33

    Optane?

    Open ##3901635

  • @ms_lane@lemmy.world 2026-07-24 06:09

    Been doing this for a while now, cheapo Optane M10 drives do ~250MB/s Q1T1 random, which is faster than ANY regular NAND SSD. There were designed as frequently rewritten cache drives too, so longevity isn’t an issue.

    Open ##4055759