That may have been the ideal usage back in the day, but ideal usage now is just for setting up swap. Write-heavy workloads are king with Optane, and threshing to swap is the prototypical example of something that's so write-heavy it's a terrible fit for NAND. Optane might not have been "as fast as DRAM" but it was plenty close enough to be fit for purpose.
replyThat would be fine if I could put it in an M.2 slot. But all my computers already have RAM in their RAM slots, and even if I had a spare RAM slot, I don't know that I'd trust the software stack to treat one RAM slot as a drive...
replyAnd their whole deal was making RAM persistent anyway, which isn't exactly what I want.
Optane M.2-format hardware exists.
replyIirc it wasn't great because higher power == more heat though
replyThat could be addressed with a small NVMe heatsink. They're available and their use is advised already for NAND PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 hardware, but they would fit the Optane use just as well.
replyInteresting, all I ever saw advertised was that weird persistent kinda slow RAM stick. Does the M.2 version just show up as a normal block device or is that too trying to be persistent RAM?
reply> The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS.
replyIt was also the best boot drive money could buy. Still is, I think, though other comments in the thread ask how it compares against today's best, which I'd also love to see.
This concept was very popular back in the days when computers used to boot from HDD, but now it doesn't make much sense. I wouldn't notice If my laptop boots for 5 sec instead of 10.
replyAt the time of their introduction Optane drives were noticeably faster to boot your machine than even the fastest available Flash SSD. So in a workstation with multiple hard drives installed anyway, buying one to boot off of made decent sense.
replyIf they had been cheaper, I think they'd have been really, really popular.
Not just capacity but SSD speeds also improved to the point it was good enough for many high memory workloads.
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