My company that I work at tossed old Computers and one of them was a relatively newer one that had this 16gb Intel optane. I've always wanted to mess with them but I'm not sure how they work, or if this one even WILL work, it's weathered some rain. I'll clean it up and let it dry for a while.
I do have an i5 8400 and a compatible motherboard that should have optane support.
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Some type of ZFS cache or Cache for an HDD
(idk how to set those up)
Batocera boot
Can form lines of assorted powders on flat surfaces.
Throw in the trash, I have four times more vram
It’s useless. Just get a real nvme drive.
Slightly more storage and RAM?
No reason not to install it
From what I know (which is prolly wrong), Optane is storage and RAM on the same module so more RAM and storage
Could be a boot drive for a second OS
Page file to keep writes off of your boot drive. If I remember correctly those Optane drives are nigh indestructible (at least from ordinary usage patterns), which means it should be fantastic for write-intensive use cases.
Box cutter
Make a Linux boot drive with it? I guess? Lol
These were the early days of nvme, so don’t expect them to be anywhere near as fast as modern ones.
These could be good for a firewall os like pfsense or opnsense.
Those make excellent boot drives for appliances that don’t need much space, like pfsense or proxmox. They all have incredible durability, way more than typical nand flash.
If GPUs had an m.2 slot in them to expand VRAM, you could use it for that.
https://i.redd.it/hnn40w3x6aue1.gif
Drill a hole and make a keychain
Put a small Linux distro on it and use it for streaming and browsing. Although idk how freezable that is considering that would mean the is a need for a PC with that
Put doom on it like 100 times and give it to an it guy
Use it as a boot drive for your operating system or something like that
Bring it to a Geek Squad and say “The guy on the phone said it has the Bit Clogga and that you geeks can hack it” Might give an ARA some PTSD flashbacks though.
Throw it in the sea and roar like a viking!
besides using it as a boot drive and a cache drive?
you can buy one of those usb-nvme enclosure and turn it into a ventoy stick.
Is essentially just a tiny, fast, long-lasting ssd.
If you do creative work in Adobe, you can use it as a dedicated scratch disk.
You can also install it use it as “extra ram” by signing it to be virtual memory (a swap file). It’s pretty easy to do in your settings. It only does a little something when your system runs out of ram, but that’s more than nothing.
That’s all I can think of.
Good luck
Encrypt personal information and documentation as backup? Documents such as pdfs don’t take much space
It could be bumhole bound….
primocache [https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/index.html](https://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/primo-cache/index.html)
These are way more reliable than the usual USB drives so you could put it in a USB enclosure and use it as a more reliable USB drive.
There’s chips on there, eat those.
makes a good Chinese throwing star
Optane Drives are in a RAID array and the first drive which is protected is very hard to reach unless you have the original PC. It is essentially a secure partition that has to read the second drive to work. If it was formatted you might be in luck, if it wasn’t it’s kind of worthless in most cases. Those drives have changed a little overtime so you may get lucky. I work in computer forensics and they are the bane of my existence sometimes.
Optane support not needed. It’s an m.2 NVMe drive. Only x2, but the random writes are still great. Good boot drive for a small OS.. a very small OS.
I use them for slog for zfs to speed up an hdd pool that hosts an nfs share.
If you have an unused m2 slot, plug it in and use it for your page file. It’s not really useful for anything else anyway
Cache for Truenas?
It’s worth like $5
Man I’d love one of these small ones. Likely could fit a decent chunk of my lightroom catalog or database on it. Too cheap to buy one, but would love to get one for free lol
3DXP is much better at cold storage than NAND. Great for keeping a copy of your most important documents.
Mount swap there.
A necklace
I have 4 (four) 32GB versions that I used in my unRAID box as a cache pool before I went alll flash
M.2 SATA speeds are like those of an HDD. Buy a cheap case and use it as a Windows installation drive.
new pc with 16GB SSD ? dell optiplex ?
Scrape ice off your windshield in a few months i guess
This is an SSD that automatically stores the most frequently used files. It seems to work only with Intel processors. It is useless today, SSDs have become much cheaper
I turned one into a cache drive for shadowplay so I don’t annihilate my good ssd’s.
Frame it and donate to a tech museum.
Cache for TrueNAS Scale.