Normal
You can use the Optane 'cache' SSDs anywhere you want to, they are exposed as an NVME m.2 drive just like any other NAND based NVME m.2 drive. You could throw one on a Ryzen board running Linux and set it up as the L2ARC drive for a ZFS filesystem with no problems.The 'special sauce' is the same RST on-CPU/on-PCH caching (rather than in-software caching) that has been around for years, originally intended to add small m.2 NAND SATA SSD caches to spinning-rust drives. With Optane, this is extended to NVME SSDs also (and you can accelerate other NVME drives as well as SATA HDDs and SSDs). I think the only thing Intel is stopping anyone from doing is using an NVME NAND SSD (regardless of vendor) as a cache drive for another NVME NAND SSD.
You can use the Optane 'cache' SSDs anywhere you want to, they are exposed as an NVME m.2 drive just like any other NAND based NVME m.2 drive. You could throw one on a Ryzen board running Linux and set it up as the L2ARC drive for a ZFS filesystem with no problems.
The 'special sauce' is the same RST on-CPU/on-PCH caching (rather than in-software caching) that has been around for years, originally intended to add small m.2 NAND SATA SSD caches to spinning-rust drives. With Optane, this is extended to NVME SSDs also (and you can accelerate other NVME drives as well as SATA HDDs and SSDs). I think the only thing Intel is stopping anyone from doing is using an NVME NAND SSD (regardless of vendor) as a cache drive for another NVME NAND SSD.
