The Optane NVMe drives were more like $1-2 per GB when they were new, and are a fair bit cheaper now that they're basically on clearance: https://www.newegg.com

The Optane NVMe drives were more like $1-2 per GB when they were new, and are a fair bit cheaper now that they're basically on clearance: https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-ssd-905p-series-960gb/p/N82E16820167463 https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-ssd-905p-series-960gb/p/... But this work used the Optane DC Persistent Memory DIMMs that only work with certain Intel server CPUs. I'm not sure what the typical price people actually paid for those was, but it probably was not actually more expensive than DRAM.