While all the review Hades Canyon NUC's appear to be loaded with a 118GB Optane 800P plus "another" M.2 drive, in all cases the Optane drive is the boot drive.
My plan is to run VMWare Workstation on my new NUC with a number of VM's that I use for demos in various configurations. Three of my VM's love to run with an Optane Cache in operation. I was hoping that I could install a cheapish 2TB M.2 SATA SSD as my primary drive and run a 118GB Optane 800P as my secondary drive as a pure cache drive (like I have done on larger desktops). To do this, I will need to run the latest version of Intel RST. The problem is that I'm not sure if the NUC is a qualified platform for RST v16.0.2.1086. Is anybody here able to confirm this configuration?
If you read this link https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005501/boards-and-kits.html you will determine that using the 800P as a cache drive is not possible.
By contrast, if you read these links it suggests that the full raft of Optane support is available for this new NUC.
Download Intel® Optane™ Memory User Interface and Driver for System Acceleration (see Platforms supported for Intel Optane Memory where HM175 is specifically mentioned as supported)
Intel's Caching History - The Intel Optane Memory (SSD) Preview: 32GB of Kaby Lake Caching (see 5th paragraph where HM175 is specifically mentioned)
Intel: No 200-Series Mobile Chipsets, Optane Memory Support Comes To 100-Series Chipset Instead (see 2nd paragraph where HM175 is specifically mentioned)
I also notice that ALL the NUC Hades Canyon reviews that I have read all contain Optane 800P drives that were supplied by Intel. Why would Intel promote 800P Optane inside this new NUC if its not fully supported?
Could we have a definitive answer on this please?