I'd like to offer my experience with the consumer-targeted Optane devices. I had a laptop that I replaced about 2 or 3 years ago, that had a hybrid 512GB HDD + 32GB Optane storage.
It was a massive headache for me. One fine day my laptop ran into the common Windows issue of 100% disk utilization. I tried all the common fixes to no avail, and at some point I remembered my disk had some funky new tech called Optane. I disabled Optane through its software and was able to directly access the underlying HDD. I checked the fragmentation level for the HDD, lo and behold it was fragmented to oblivion.
Turns out because Windows treats Optane disks as SSDs even though I actually had an underlying HDD, my HDD was simply not defragmented by the OS. After a few rounds of installing and uninstalling large games, the HDD was in an unusable state with regards to fragmentation.
I did a short write-up PSA on r/Windows10, and apparently the issue was widespread enough that my post helped about 10 people in the comments. Thinking back, this whole series of events is partially the reason why I moved from being a non-technical person to a (somewhat) technical one. Good times.
Ugh, a friend bought some similar device due to a misleading description of what the HD was. He'd tried to change the partitioning without knowing it was there; turns out if you had anything but a single Windows partition (with custom drivers injected in the right undocumented way at install-time) you ended up with a sans-optane uncached 5400rpm HDD, which even at that time was completely unfeasible as a system disc.
Absolutely horrible product. And not even cheap before having to turf it out in favour of a proper SSD.
It was a massive headache for me. One fine day my laptop ran into the common Windows issue of 100% disk utilization. I tried all the common fixes to no avail, and at some point I remembered my disk had some funky new tech called Optane. I disabled Optane through its software and was able to directly access the underlying HDD. I checked the fragmentation level for the HDD, lo and behold it was fragmented to oblivion.
Turns out because Windows treats Optane disks as SSDs even though I actually had an underlying HDD, my HDD was simply not defragmented by the OS. After a few rounds of installing and uninstalling large games, the HDD was in an unusable state with regards to fragmentation.
I did a short write-up PSA on r/Windows10, and apparently the issue was widespread enough that my post helped about 10 people in the comments. Thinking back, this whole series of events is partially the reason why I moved from being a non-technical person to a (somewhat) technical one. Good times.