$17.88 Intel Optane NVMe 16 GB PCIe (Renewed)

Intel Optane Memory Module 16 GB PCIe M.2 80mm MEMPEK1W016GAXT (Renewed)

https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07GX597CR

Seems like a fantastic deal for a cheap ESXi/Hyper-V/FreeNAS/UnRAID bootdisk or even a ZFS ZIL (For 1gbps at least, not good for anything more than that).

Better than a USB drive and cheaper than SATA DOMs. Not the fastest NVMe drive, and takes up a precious PCIe slot, but many may be interested. I wish I saw these before I got the 5 pack of SATA DOMs last wee.

 

Don't you need an adapter to plug them into a PCIe slot?

Looks like that's another $12 or so: https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07JJTVGZM

 

$6 https://smile.amazon.com/dp/B07PYHVXJS

And no different than any M.2 drive.

 

I would highly recommend the 32GB over the 16GB for ZIL, you will get about twice as much iops. But for this price, is has great value! For non production use, I would not worry about wear, you can replace it with something else in 3-5 years. Also it may be a good time to set some filesystems to just async io. For example non transactional data like torrent images have no need for sync io.

A good use is also creating two partitions, 512MB for ZIL should be enough for this device. And the rest could be L2ARC. With just 15GB of data for L2ARC, you will not use much ARC memory for mapping either. Though I would recommend using a third partition for swap also. On my 280GB 900p, I have 4GB zil, 32GB swap and the rest is L2ARC.

 

Oh and if you dare buying from China
Intel Optane 16GB Memory Module 16GB PCIe NVMe M.2 80mm 3.0 x2 New Pull | eBay

Its just 12 bucks, and it should be easy to verify if its fake or not.

 

Could always just use it for a boot volume (linux distros) if sata ports are a premium or you have some really small case.