The Most Extreme Storage Configuration For Windows 7 Operating System
Despite being “this kinda old”
I still prefer to stay on the edge of the technical rainbow,
so much so that even Gen Z can rarely keep up with my tech cravings.
Today’s topic is the final bottleneck in my Windows 7 build: storage speed and its latency.
The rest of the hardware: CPU, GPU, RAM has already reached a point where
there are virtually no bottlenecks or limitations left.
After today’s upgrades, the only latency that will remain will come from the OS kernel itself.
So, yeah, let’s dive into the topic.
For real-world applications, the most important performance metrics
aren’t the heavily advertised sequential read/write speeds,
they’re drive latency and how quickly a drive can access random 4K blocks.
Only one family of drives truly excels at this: Intel’s Optane lineup.
I’ve already had a brief acquaintance with this technology by setting up a RAID 0 array out of two M10 Optane sticks.
I managed to configure a caching system and point it straight to that M10 RAID 0 setup.
The tech runs on the PCIe 3.0 bus, a bit dated by today’s standards, but still remarkably efficient.
Today, I’m adding another layer of madness to this extreme storage configuration.
The M10 sticks are no slouches: they deliver around 300 MB/s in random 4K performance,
which is roughly double what even the most advanced Gen5 NVMe drives offer.
But is there anything better out there?
Yes: the final generation of Optane drives, released in 2021-2022.
The models are the P5800X and P5810X. They push random 4K performance even higher and slash latency further.
The P5810X is technically about 1µs faster in latency, but it’s extremely rare and hard to find,
largely because it was Intel’s swan song for the technology.
Near-mint examples routinely go for $2,000 - $3,000 on eBay.
Given the marginal gains, that’s just too steep, so I’m sticking with the 400 GB P5800X.
It’ll be more than enough for the Windows 7 installation.
Here’s a breakdown of my current storage stack,
ordered from fastest to slowest in terms of 4K access time and latency:
- Fixed swap file: Mounted on a RAM disk via SoftPerfect RAM Disk [DDR5]
- OS drive: 400 GB Optane P5800X, connected to an M.2 slot via an adapter [PCIe 4.0]
- Caching system & temp folders: Optane M10 32 GB (16 GB x 2) in RAID 0, M.2 [PCIe 3.0]
- Data drive: WD Black SN8100 1 TB Gen5 NVMe [PCIe 5.0]
The idea is to distribute different processes across dedicated hardware to minimize
response times and push performance to its absolute limits.
I’ve also included a few speed comparisons below to make the differences
between storage tiers more visible, and to show how these technologies interact under load.
In previous post i’ve dropped some P5800X and even WD Black SN8100 Gen5 NVME charts,
to make article more complete, so [check this out]
That’s it for today. I hope this was an interesting read, and that you picked up something useful for your own builds.
