Re: One thing may be data files...
Boot a Linux system and it probes for peripherals. I assume that Windows does too and has done since the Plug and Pray came into use. If it finds something it loads the driver. If you initially boot your persistent memory device, use it, switch off and later restart having plugged in or unplugged something how does it cope with that? If persistent memory means, for example, it can be just switched off and on again it will continue without making the necessary driver adjustments.
I suppose you could have all the drivers loaded all the time but then there are probably many more times the drivers that need to be there and the kernel needs to manage all those. What worked on a Spectrum doesn't necessarily play well with modern hardware.
To make use of a very different memory model requires a different approach to software; I think we're all agreed on that. The question is, whose responsibility is it to develop that. Intel seems to have put the hardware together on the basis of "Build it and they will come.". They didn't. I'm sure that Intel will have contributed drivers to enable Optane to work in as a conventional filesystem device or as a cache but it doesn't appear that they have done the development work for the novel approach that would be needed to make it a persistent memory device.
When I bought my current laptop I had the option of configuring it with an Optane or SSD. I looked at that, thought I'd vaguely heard of Optane but didn't really know what it was I was being offered or how I might be able to use it and it seemed expensive for the the size. So I plumped for a 2Tb hard drive for /home & /srv and an SSD big enough to hold the rest at least a couple of times over.
Optane didn't have the price per Gb to make it a mainstream storage device nor the software support to make it a mainstream persistent memory device. The former was probably an insuperable problem. The latter might have been a possibility but it would have needed at least a proof of concept OS to take advantage of it and enough time for that to be built on.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
