LLMs tend to care for sequential bandwidth more than random access. From that perspective, Optane probably doesn't offer much of an advantage vs other NVMe drives even from the same era while losing out greatly to newer drives with faster busses to fill. There could be something special to this particular instance but https://github.com/argonautlabsai/deltafin/blob/main/k3-publ... and the overall tok/s numbers seem to suggest it's just the sequential that's playing in.

Probably not. Each read here is a whole 17.5 MB expert file, so the time per read is set by the drive's throughput, not its access latency — 17.5 MB at 7 GB/s is ~2.5 ms, which is what we measure at queue depth 1 on the SN8100s.

What actually moves the barrier is how fast the slowest of 16 concurrent whole-file reads completes: more drives on direct ports, stable tail behaviour under load, and scheduling. Our ladder shows even that with diminishing returns (one drive ≈52% of four, three ≈90%).