NVMe leave, or remove

That's an Intel Optane device. You'll get more speed out of it than the SATA SSD, although the benefit will be much less than with the HDD and the overhead of combining them could take away some of the speed improvement.

A couple of other options:

1. Replace it with a new NVMe drive, and skip the SATA SSD altogether. If buying a new drive this is what I'd do.
2. Set it up as a separate volume for a 16GB Windows page file - it'll be much faster than swapping to SATA SSD.

Theo

I don't know if it has changed now, but Windows didn't have drivers for Optane drives, I had to download from Intel and fart about installing them.

I don't speak Windows, but as far as the OS is concerned they show up as a standard NVMe drive. So Windows (>8.1) should be able to talk to them as a

16GB additional drive.

What most people wanted drivers for is using them as an accelerator (cache) of an existing drive, ie making a hybrid/fusion drive out of two drives together. That needs the extra Intel drivers.

You could do the hybrid thing with a SATA SSD but it's diminishing returns - SATA SSDs aren't super quick in bandwidth terms but they're a lot lower latency than a spinning HDD, which is mostly why they did the cache thing.

But if you use it as a page file it's more like 'RAM' than 'disc' - in a laptop in which you can't add any more real RAM that could be a useful performance improvement.

Theo (who specced a server with 2TB of Optane once - it was quick :-)

As a personal preference on my part, I like computer hardware configurations that are easy to understand and deal with. I don't like "mystery meat" behaviors in PCs.

My research then, would start with a visit to the BIOS setup screen. Is the hybrid mode controllable, or not ? What modes does it have ? Can the SATA drive be run as a SATA drive, without the hybrid caching >

If so:

1) On the day the new SSD arrives, remove the Optane and put in one of your anti-static bags. Install the new SSD. Now the SSD is the only storage in the machine. 2) Boot and select to enter the BIOS. You have to know which key to press to get into the BIOS. You can practice entering the BIOS, using your existing setup. 3) In the BIOS, the hybrid can now be disabled. The SATA could be listed as in AHCI mode (not RAID mode because you're not using any RAID driver, any more). The OS MSAHCI driver will be running the SSD from now on. No special driver to download.

The SATA SSD would be 530 MB/sec or so. The Optane is

2000 MB/sec, and it only caches, say, the OS boot files. It accelerates booting. The SATA SSD is faster than an ordinary rotating platter hard drive, which takes forever to boot.

While the 530 MB/sec SATA is not as fast as a 7000 MB/sec NVMe, if it boots three seconds slower, you won't be losing any sleep. As an older laptop, the CPU isn't running at 6GHz in any case, and just the CPU limitation means the storage limitation is not the limiting part. The CPU can be a bit slow. Like my ten year old desktop with 3.4GHz processor feels slow. And that desktop has SSDs for storage too. It does not have NVMe slots or a BIOS that supports NVMe, so NVMe is not an option on it. And that's a good thing. It means the 42 PCI Express lanes are mine, all mine.

The machine that does have an NVMe, does feel faster. It feels faster because during boot, the CPU core is running at 5GHz. All the rowers, are rowing in the same direction.

with your new reliability model, it's like all other computers.

1) The SSD is alive or it is dead. 2) To protect against being dead, you do backups. 3) If the SSD is dead, you replace it, and restore from the last backup.

That's the kind of simple model I like in my computers. There are no half way states, no "well, maybe if I take the Optane and the SSD to the shop, they can do data recovery for me". With the simplified model, you now know exactly what your options are. The SSD is alive or dead. If dead, you need your backup for recovery. Data recovery on SSDs, is not necessarily an easy thing, and I don't even want to go there. If an SSD dies here, "it's a short toss into the trash". No reason to play with it. No user serviceable parts. The data is sprayed randomly around inside it, and the recovery pattern is not easy to get right. For example, it can be using default encryption inside, which means reading the flash chips with an instrument, "it all looks random". No user serviceable parts. Toast. Plan accordingly.

Paul