Still have 4 brand new ones in my storage unit. Just in case these moments.

Joke aside (I do have them tho!), I don't think Optane is that much use (not to mention it is only 256GiB for my unit). It is useful legacy crutch if you have legacy software that is not designed to issue multiple reads / writes in parallel. If you do, it is really not faster than NVMe, especially these modern ones.

It's not about being faster (except for small reads where latency dominates, which is actually relevant when reading a handful of expert-layers immediately after routing), it's the wearout resistance which opens up the possibility of storing KV-cache (including the "linear" KV-cache of recent Qwen, which is not append-only as it was with the pure attention model) and maybe even per-layer activations - though this has the least use given how ephemeral these are.