Can anyone explain the purpose of a 32 gig NVMe SSD? I think it's quite an apple thing to install such a stupidly tiny drive into a computer, but on the other hand it doesn't seem right. This can't be a system drive can it? But what else could it be? This is like an impractical, high-speed USB drive that requires disassembly of the computer to remove...
It's for the "Fusion Drive." It was just used as a cache basically. You had a larger, slower drive behind it for capacity, this just held frequently accessed data.
Sounds like intels optane drives
More or less. Fusion Drive was introduced when high capacity SSDs were rather expensive. Although the SSD part had 128 GB iirc. Apple stuck with Fusion Drive BTO options for way too long and also nerfed it to 32 GB as evidenced here.
Man, Intel seriously needs to license Optane out. That technology represents a new paradigm for digital storage. It's simpler/cheaper to manufacturer than flash memory and its speed is more comparable to RAM than flash, it's at least an order of magnitude faster than current nvme drives. It's also three dimensional, so there's potential to make super fast terabyte, even petabyte sized drives.
I wish the world was competing to make better Optane/xPoint drives like they are with flash, it's a shame the tech is locked behind a patent...