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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.


I use something similar to this, the only differences are because my use case is privacy protection and avoiding algorithmic feeds. I use the Redirector extension for Firefox so that it redirects e.g. Youtube, Twitter, and StackOverflow links to the corresponding alternative frontends Piped, Nitter, and AnonymousOverflow. You can find maintained lists [1] [2] of such projects and their instances. Mostly they are FOSS and privacy-respecting, and they have distraction-free frontends because it's a helpful coincidence of being ethical software.

[1] https://github.com/digitalblossom/alternative-frontends [2] https://farside.link


This is amazing. I had similar ideas in my bucket list of creating distraction free alternatives and redirecting somehow.

Happy to know someone had the same idea and there are versions of it online. Thanks for letting me know of this, I really appreciate it!


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