Still not competitive with flash storage
480GB of PCIe memory for the same price as a Samsung 960 Pro 2TB PCIe, and I seriously doubt it will be 4x as fast.
Sharp-eyed storage-watchers have noticed some new Intel solid state disks with Chipzilla's Optane 3D Xpoint memory/storage aboard popping up on web stores. Four SKUs are listed in many web shops, all with the name 900P, but the following product numbers and qualities: SSDPE21D280GASM, a 2.5-inch drive with 280GB capacity and …
The Tech Report SSD endurance test (http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead) indicates that the life of SSDs is considerably higher than the manufacturers claims.
The 960 pro uses V-NAND in MLC mode (2 bits/cell) and as V-NAND has larger feature sizes than planar NAND, the lifespan should be even higher than in the Tech Report test.
(The 256Gb 840 pro managed over 2PB written - just allowing for the larger flash array a 2TB 960 pro drive should manage over 16PB and allowing for the larger feature size of V-NAND would probably manage over 20PB written.)
How many enterprise hard disks ever have 8000 total drives writes during their working life?
You have an overly pessimistic view of flash, and an overlay optimist view of 3D Xpoint. The quoted Samsung drive can handle 1.2TB of writes PER DAY for 3 years before it hits its specification, and a fair bit longer than that before it fails. Conversely the current version of Optane (3D Xpoint) is only good for about 100GB/day on a 32GB Drive. Scaling this up to 480GB drives you still only get roughly comparable endurance as the Samsung.
I still use a Samsung 830 256GB daily, for imaging systems as a temporary backup, and it hasn't missed a beat. I'd hate to guess how much data has been written to it over the years now. I have had a Samsung 840 corrupt data when left unused for a good few months though. So it worth just powering up any Samsung drive you have lying about every so often.