this is the idiot that took down twitter when he yeeted racks out of a data center and threw 'em into a u-haul… ones that were still powered on and used by the site. so anything’s possible… but i don’t think even he would be so stupid as to release the algorithms or his special ‘tweaks’ to them.

the last sentence in the submission text might explain the ‘why’, at least from the project developer’s pov:

built in Rust

optane modules can be reformatted and used as a regular m2 nvme ssd. i have used one here before, just drop it in and ran mint or whatever installer and let it do its thing. they’re kinda slow (relative to recent gen nvme) but high endurance. so to answer your question, it would displace one of your m2 ssd.

if there’s an unused sata port, i’d probably go with your other option–sata boot. take care cloning bootable nvme to sata.

i have no idea.

i personally bin (recycle bin, that is) any drive (ssd or hdd) that has any abnormality in its internal diagnostics data, or won’t pass short and long diagnostics tests even if their stats are clean.