16GB Optane is what I have that works in conjunction with a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive. These 16gb Optane chips go for $13 on eBay. Intel had a great idea but NVME drives are down in price so you get an NVME for your boot drive. Or buy a computer or a laptop that has an NVME boot drive and conventional hard drive for storage.
NVME is where it is at. I’ll bet HP is not even making Optane computers any more. Dell and Lenovo did.
From what I read 16GB Optane gets used up so fast that they were not even recommended at all, but yes, 512GB NVME for about $50 makes that the better buy if speed is the issue. And considering that a 1TB SSD ($90) is not much more than a HDD and is supposed to last much longer now, then I think that should be the storage drive.