The review is rather telling
(4kB random r/w) "Again, Optane really eclipses the standalone hard drive here. Whereas the HDD reached random read and write speeds of .5MB/s and 1.7MB/s, respectively, Optane averaged 126.3 MB/s and 196.8 MB/s. Those are orders of magnitude faster performances."
A decent SATA SSD (SM863) will go _at least_ twice as fast as the Optane+HDD combo, let alone if you use a decent NVMe device - and they're simply not particularly expensive in smaller sizes (256 or 512Gb)
This really is a solution in search of a problem that was solved years ago. If this is all Optane is good for then Flash will continue to eat its lunch.
Now, what if someone sets up a bcache with Optane+NVMe drive? Worthwhile or a pile of fetid dingo kidneys?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
