Options using ssd drives vs one optane 900p.

[donedeal19]

I already have an pool of spinners with 12 2tb drives and one optane 900p on windows 2019. I have 1 free pcie lane left and a work colleague has offered me 8 intel dc s3700 400gb, or for the same price a 900p. These drives are hpe vendor and we have no way of updating them to the newest firmware version.
They have been sitting in a shelf for the last two years. Is there an easy way to get the drives flash to latest firmware? What would it take to get it flash?
The drives are working fine just no smart data or firmware access.
I really would like to consider the ssd offer but I also know that optane offers.

So if you had an opportunity having 8 ssd or 2 optane as tier storage which way would you like to use?
My case use is just an learning lab with a few vms nothing critical just teaching myself powershell, high speed, networking and soon clustering.
Also, I have no way to split the last pcie lane to 4x4x4x4.
I am open to any suggestions, ideas on improvements to my project.

 

[BackupProphet]

Optane is definitely more fun It opens up a lot of interesting use cases.

 

[Jason Antes]

Depends on what your goals are. If you want redundancy then you have to mirror the optane or RAID5/6/10 the 8 others. You lose half the space or 1-2 disks depending on which disk(s) you buy. If you just want performance than it's a no-brainer. If you want capacity then get the 8 drives as it gives you capacity and the ability for redundancy.

As for flashing the firmware, get the p/n for the drives and look them up on HPE's site. I don't think those are contract protected. Individual firmware can be done with smart update (SUM) I believe.