[cgannett]

even if its not faster than DRAM I wonder at what point would it just not make sense to have two separate modules. Like all the volitile storage in a system could be in the L-cache/s on the CPU and for most things that plus this faster non-volitile storage would do the trick. I wonder what kind of optimizations would have been made in a world where stuff like DRAM just didnt exist and we just had to deal with the bottlenecks of non-volitile storage media

[coredog64]

Sounds like the era when we mainly transitioned to solid state storage. When spinning rust was the primary technology and RAM prices were high, you could buy hybrid drives that had small amounts of solid state cache (mainly intended for common OS files). And even today, all but the cheapest SSDs will have onboard DRAM for better write speeds.