I feel like this is proving my point. You can’t read “Optane” and have any real idea of what you’re buying.

Also… were those weird hybrid SSDs even implemented by actual hardware, or were they part of the giant series of massive kludges in the “Rapid Storage” family where some secret sauce in the PCIe host lied to the OS about what was actually connected so an Intel driver could replace the OS’s native storage driver (NVMe, AHCI, or perhaps something worse depending on generation) to implement all the actual logic in software?

It didn’t help Intel that some major storage companies started selling very, very nice flash SSDs in the mean time.

> were those weird hybrid SSDs even implemented by actual hardware, or were they part of the giant series of massive kludges

They were definitely part of the series of massive kludges. But aside from the Intel platforms they were marketed for, I never found a PCIe host that could see both of the NVMe devices on the drive. Some hosts would bring up the x2 link to the Optane half of the drive, some hosts would bring up the x2 link to the QLC half of the drive, but I couldn't find any way to get both links active even when the drive was connected downstream of a PCIe switch that definitely had hardware support for bifurcation down to x2 links. I suspect that with appropriate firmware hacking on the host side, it may have been possible to get those drives fully operational on a non-Intel host.