Intel Optane as storage device takes a long time to initialize on Windows start?

[AntmanMike]

I picked up an Intel Optane 32GiB module to use as a paging file device (it's useful for me). Benchmark-wise, the device is great for it. However... I'm having an issue where upon booting the system and logging in... my S: drive (the partition taking up the device) shows up as blank. Trying to get its properties hangs. Opening partition manager or any other window that accesses drives hangs. It takes about 5 minutes, at which point the S: drive 'pops up' and becomes available. This is all on Windows 10.

I am at a loss as to what is going on. The system is pretty sluggish between logging in and this point. I'm not entirely sure what it's doing, and nothing out of the ordinary shows up in the task manager. It is sharing the system with 6 other SSDs - 5 SATA and 1 NVMe/M.2. The boot device is an M.2.

Anyone have any thoughts, or ideas as to how I can go about diagnosing this?

 

[petteyg359]

Is the device bootable? If not, and it requires an OS driver to load before it can be seen by the system, wild guess: Windows is not seeing the drive at first, and allocating your paging file to C: instead, and only later moving it back to S: after it loads the driver. If you're suspending to disk instead of fully shutting down, I'll double down on that wild guess.

 

[AntmanMike]

It comes up as a standard NVMe device, and uses the Microsoft NVMe driver. I suspect if it didn't see the drive, it wouldn't show the S: drive in 'This PC' (it shows it, it just has no information and cannot be accessed).

If I go to Performance Settings under System during this time, 'Paging File Size' is '0'. Once the S: drive is initialized, it jumps up. I can't actually enter page file settings though until the S: drive initializes, as it otherwise just hangs.

 

[petteyg359]

It comes up as a standard NVMe device, and uses the Microsoft NVMe driver. I suspect if it didn't see the drive, it wouldn't show the S: drive in 'This PC' (it shows it, it just has no information and cannot be accessed).

If I go to Performance Settings under System during this time, 'Paging File Size' is '0'. Once the S: drive is initialized, it jumps up. I can't actually enter page file settings though until the S: drive initializes, as it otherwise just hangs.

I think that reinforces my wild guess that it's spending that time re-copying the 32GB paging file from C: back to S: on every startup