alt Hacker NewsIMO, the reason they didn't sell is the ideal usage for them is pairing them with some slow spinning disks. The issue Optane had is that SSD capacity grew dramatically while the price plummeted. The difference between Optane and SSDs was too small. Especially since the M.2 standard proliferated and SSDs took advantage of PCI-E performance.
I believe Optane retained a performance advantage (and I think even today it's still faster than the best SSDs) but SSDs remain good enough and fast enough while being a lot cheaper.
The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS.
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> The ideal usage of optane was as a ZIL in ZFS.
It was also the best boot drive money could buy. Still is, I think, though other comments in the thread ask how it compares against today's best, which I'd also love to see.
Not just capacity but SSD speeds also improved to the point it was good enough for many high memory workloads.
That may have been the ideal usage back in the day, but ideal usage now is just for setting up swap. Write-heavy workloads are king with Optane, and threshing to swap is the prototypical example of something that's so write-heavy it's a terrible fit for NAND. Optane might not have been "as fast as DRAM" but it was plenty close enough to be fit for purpose.