Grab the cheapest Intel Optane M10 drive from eBay with a 1x PCI-E adapter from them too. 16GB of Swap for less than $20.
The M10 are over produced and only PCI-E 3.0 2x lane devices but 16GB of DDR5 is going to cost over $200.
You can do the same with USB-C M.2 adapters but the adapters cost more and eww USB for Swap, hope the device never drops.
Hey, I apologize for using you as tech support, but I found tons of those M10 sticks you are talking about, but what should I be looking for in terms of an adapter? All I can find are adapters listed as M.2:
https://www.amazon.com/GLOTRENDS-Adapter-Aluminum-Heatsink-P...
That's a 4 lane adapter, it'll work if you have a 4x, 8x, or 16x PCI-E slot open. This is a 1 lane adapter: https://www.ebay.com/itm/128010189845?var=429206655218
I believe the intention is for you to put it in the M.2
Is that really competitive with just doing a pciexpress card with faster M2 SSD ?
Optane on a cheap adapter is superior in just this Swap application because the 16GB M.2 are very cheap, the 2x lanes aren't under utilizing your 4x motherboard M.2 slot when used with an adapter, and Optane has better write endurance and latency then even the newest flash.
Read more about it. Not sure on endurance but does it really do that well on latency ? Curious if you have any resources. Some boards have a lot of spare m2
https://cdn.multitronic.fi/media/a/3/mmo_41700684_1565162938...
I suggest using an 1x PCI-e adapter because putting a M10 in a M.2 slot is likely going to only have 2 of 4 PCI-e lanes in use. You have to figure out the tradeoff of using a Swap on your, now very expensive as well, Flash storage that may have flashier sequential read and write speeds but doesn't have the ability to sustain random read and write performance which is what a Swap is going to use the most.
There are faster Optane drives that use 4 PCI-e lanes or even PCI-e 4.0, but they get pricey quickly, so you should just buy ram then. The deal is the 16GB Optane on an unused 1x PCI-e slot.
What about using one of those fancier enterprise Optane drives (that are also larger) either as a swap or - dedicated drive for writing or reading huge amounts of small files ? The Intel P5800x is the opposite of cheap but from tests I'm seeing the latency and performance is very impressive for some niche use cases