$6.00 USD 16GB Intel Optane NVME SSD - Useful or E-Waste ?

[Allan74]

At their current price starting @ $6.00 USD each (16GB Optane NVME SSD), could a single drive perhaps serve as RAID Cache or substitute for scenarios on a Workstation where one might want a RAM Drive (temp file/folder redirection in Windows) providing a PCH connected NVME Slot with proper key (B/M/etc) were available?
Now, how about in an AMD Ryzen based Desktop ? Would this drive simply be seen as a 16GB drive to be used normally ?

I am going to grab a few, if for nothing else, to toy with.

thanks,
Allan

 

[nexox]

I have a couple that I also grabbed because they were too cheap not try, they work fine as regular NVMe drives in my pci-e card adapters (The hybrid TLC/Optane drives are the ones that aren't widely compatible,) but they're really just a bit small for the number of pci-e lanes they consume, especially when a 118GB p1600x can be had for $60-70.

I haven't quite figured out what to do with mine, I have machines with open slots, write cache for software raid sounds like the best use, but then the Optane drive is a single point of failure, and if I need to move those disks to another machine to work around a failure then I also need the cache drive, which isn't going to be hot swap... so yeah I'm not sure.

 

[Patriot]

They are good router drives.

 

[reasonsandreasons]

Yeah, I love these as boot drives. My TrueNAS Scale system is running with a 32GB one like a treat. Endurance is much better than NAND (though perhaps not if it was overprovisioned) and the price is hard to beat. In my installation I'm running with two mirrored storage drives in the motherboard's M.2 slots for fast storage and keep the Optane drive in a x1 slot off the chipset. I'm not too fussed about redundancy because of the aforementioned endurance.

Agree with nexox that these are poor cache drives, though--these were initially designed as cache for spinning rust and never really caught on. If you do want to use optane the P1600X is just far more useful. Still good for an appropriate niche, though.