Its pretty crap for the consumer market. Your typical MLC SSD (or even TLC SSD) over SATA is more than sufficient for the consumer market, at prices that actually will be used (although even a TLC SSD seems to be considered "high end" by my family members...)

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The Optane memory seems to have a niche in replacing DRAM servers. So instead of running Redis, MySQL, or Postgres on DRAM, you can run it on Optane instead.

Optane is cheaper than DDR4 but almost as fast (latency wise). Latency is a big deal when it comes to database and/or key-value pair workloads.

Er, what? Optane has half the latency of DDR4? Source?

One presentation was comparing an 8GB+HDD system to a 4GB+Optane+HDD system, showing off how the low RAM hybrid was much faster at selected tasks (carefully selected tasks, I presume). This is probably the market, another indication is the surprisingly low price.

The price difference between 4 GB and 8 GB of RAM cannot be enough to compensate for the Optane module, but if the Optane combination uses less battery than the bigger RAM and if enough benchmarks and/or magazine performance comparison use cases coincide with tasks where the hybrid shines, then some low end manufacturers might successfully sell the RAM downgrade as an upgrade option.

> "but if the Optane combination uses less battery than the bigger RAM"

With idle power specified as 0.9-1.2 W, I'm not expecting the Optane-based solutions to come out ahead on any battery life tests. PCIe power management is a horrific mess.