what is the word on optane memory

It is essentially a high speed cache for your boot drive. The idea is to transfer data to the memory and access it from there instead of from your spinning hard drive. An SSD will not benefit much, since it is already fast access storage, and only the boot partition will benefit at all in a multipartition/drive system, and it will not work on a RAID volume.  So like any caching technology performance depends on what you are doing with the cache data. Boots. reads and searches are likely to benefit the most, writes not so much. The performance benefit can be dramatic for some activities, where the data is already resident in the cache, so using it to speed bootup is likely to be impressive. If your only concern is to speed up your boot process, it is cheaper than an SSD. It may require you to clean install your OS and UEFI/BIOS if it is not already present when you installed/initialized these, and of course it only works with compatible MB and Cpu.

DaGeek's info is more current than me. But to be clear, you are still going to have to choose a single drive for the optane module to cache. This would be a big deal if you already have an SSD as your boot drive, and want to use a larger spinner as a secondary drive to get better performance.

Ever wonder what Apple's "Fusion" drive is...
It's a Seagate conventional HD... with a small Optane cache.
 

Jim Roseberry
If you need speed, best to get it at the source (the drive itself - not cache).
 

If I am understanding this, It isn't actually replacing ram per se, but hard drive access ?

Thanks Jim.  I just sent you an email