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
400GB of Optane for $500 is kinda tempting now(also the E1.s form factor p5801x). I run my P5800x on my NAS for small files and metadata. They're the fastest but I wouldn't suggest running out and buying one because you're avoiding a 16GB to 32GB upgrade, RAM is still faster. Use it as a caching or swap device when you're running a LLM on a motherboard with maxed out RAM and GPU.
