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by exmadscientist 101 days ago
> 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.
1 comments
gozzoo 101 days ago
This concept was very popular back in the days when computers used to boot from HDD, but now it doesn't make much sense. I wouldn't notice If my laptop boots for 5 sec instead of 10.
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exmadscientist 101 days ago
At the time of their introduction Optane drives were noticeably faster to boot your machine than even the fastest available Flash SSD. So in a workstation with multiple hard drives installed anyway, buying one to boot off of made decent sense.

If they had been cheaper, I think they'd have been really, really popular.

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Dylan16807 100 days ago
What concept was very popular in those days?

By my reckoning, there was zero overlap between the period of time where a reasonable computer configurer would pick a hard drive to boot from and the period of time where Optane was available.

And even for the general concept of a cache drive, I don't think I've ever seen it do well in the mainstream. Just a few niche roles, and some hybrid drives that sucked because they had small flash chips and only used them as a read cache, not a write cache.

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