Can anyone explain the purpose of a 32 gig NVMe SSD? I think it's quite an apple thing to install such a stupidly tiny drive into a computer, but on the other hand it doesn't seem right. This can't be a system drive can it? But what else could it be? This is like an impractical, high-speed USB drive that requires disassembly of the computer to remove...
It's for the "Fusion Drive." It was just used as a cache basically. You had a larger, slower drive behind it for capacity, this just held frequently accessed data.
so it's pretty much like SSHDs nowadays, or like read caching?
Pretty much the same, software solution VS hardware one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive#Types
Here's the section for the wikipedia article you mentioned in your comment:
There are two main "hybrid" storage technologies that combine NAND flash memory or SSDs, with the HDD technology: dual-drive hybrid systems and solid-state hybrid drives.
^to^ ^opt^ ^out^^,^ ^pm^ ^me^ ^'optout'.^ ^article^ ^|^ ^about^