Today, we are benchmarking Intel’s low-capacity cache drives for use as dedicated Windows pagefile storage. While I’m not typically an Intel fan boy, Optane’s architecture has consistently intrigued me. Even on systems with 64 GB+ of RAM, Windows requires a pagefile and temporary folder for memory management. I currently use a fixed 1 GB pagefile on a Gen4 NVMe SSD, but I wanted to test whether moving it to Optane, known for exceptional small-file performance would improve system responsiveness.

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.