Hello Geekdom,
I have been tracking the developments in storage tech for a number of years now, but I'm not a super-techie, so lately I have been pondering a question that no one else seems to have answered yet (at least not to my satisfaction as an amature) among the various online talking heads:
What kind of performance could we expect to see if you married (i.e. RAIDed) an M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (3rd or 4th gen) with a 16, 32 or 64GB Optane Memory Accelerator (OMA) stick, which would need to occupy a 2nd M.2 port? Would such a configuration out-perform Intel's H10 Combo SSD + OMA, given that the H10 must split its 4 I/O lanes between its SSD and Optane modules, whereas using two M.2 ports would give each stick the full use of their port's 4 lanes?
I realize that some might want to throw the question back at me saying, "Why not just install 2 H10's then if you intend to occupy both M.2 ports with storage tech anyway?", however, my response to that is that the H10's use the QLC NAND architecture for its SSD, which by itself is a slower storage solution than the current MLC architecture of high-end SSD's. I want to know what would happen if you joined high-end MLC with Low-latency Optane acceleration.
Now because I'm an amature, I'm not really interested in Benchmark scores; I'm asking this question from a desire to know if it would be a viable configuration for optimizing my user experience in general whether that be file load times, multi-tasking, gaming, productivity, etc. With such a set up, could I expect a better (smoother) user experience than with just one (or two) SSD's?
What say ye?