Star Citizen heavily leverages this portion of an SSD's speed. Not its bandwidth for large files over time (which it also uses of course), but its immediate seek speed for small files. Grabbing tons of tiny files off the disk and bringing them into RAM constantly. A Sata 3.0 SSD and higher end NVME SSD here actually have pretty similar performance even though the NVME is much faster at larger read writes. And HDD is impossibly slow at those tasks in comparison if you look at the numbers there for two 7200 RPMs in Raid 0.
And Optane absolutely blows an NVME or normal SSD out of the water in those smaller tasks. Order of magnitude.
Notice how optane destroys even an Nvme SSD in 4K reads.
They have a number of posts and interviews about it scattered out over the years of behind the scenes coverage of the game, but I am also (writing it here on ResetERA first) going to be some dedicated Star Citizen coverage soon where I will have interviews regarding this stuf. I hope you guys like it.
The reason why the game focuses on that burst / parallel data grabbing from the SSD is due to its world and asset design, and not because of the physics so much so. The game's asset size in the sizte of its world is the thing that motivated them to focus on this type of game loading. How do we stop the game from stuttering with multiple ship models and worlds where each one is multiple hundreds of megabytes in memory?