Intel Optane SSD is a discontinued line of solid state storage devices that differs from traditional solid state drives by the fact that two different kinds of storage are utilized in one device: NAND memory, like a traditional SSD, and 3D XPoint (“crosspoint”) memory, a more exotic kind of flash memory jointly developed by Intel and Micron. 3D XPoint memory is faster and more durable than traditional NAND memory and is byte-addressable, allowing fast, small reads and writes, whereas NAND is read and written at the page level (multiple sectors) and must be erased at the block level (multiple pages) before it can be rewritten. But 3D XPoint’s advantages came at a greater cost than NAND, which was probably what led to its demise.
The bulk of an Optane SSD’s capacity is made up of NAND memory, and a much smaller 3D XPoint memory module (typically 16 GB or 32 GB) is used as a cache to improve access times to frequently-used data. The catch is that the cache actually stores the only instance of data to which it’s intended to speed up access rather than a disposable copy of data from the larger NAND memory. Additionally, the Optane device is exposed to a host machine as two separate storage devices, placing the burden of combining the two onto the host machine. This can complicate matters if the need arises to read the Optane drive outside of its original machine (for example, the original machine becomes inoperable or the Optane drive itself is starting to fail). The separate storage devices will each contain incomplete file systems that will need to be combined correctly, and, assuming the computer used for this task doesn’t use a correctly-configured Intel motherboard and have certain Intel software installed, this will just confuse Windows which might ask if you’d like to initialize or format the disks. No! You absolutely do not want to do this. 🙂 We image each of the two storage devices separately, isolated from Windows’ pernicious influence, and use software to combine them into a single logical image for recovery.
If your computer shop throws in the towel, send it to us; that’s why we’re here.