If it’s that old I imagine it’s NAND not NVme and probably not compatible but if it is supported then sure, why not? for Direct Storage it’s really only important to have the sim on NVme and even then possibly just the Community, Official and Rolling/Manual Cache files. Basically Direct Storage data can bypass ram and go straight into v-ram saving a whole layer of processing. With a high end GPU the rolling cache could even be placed in v-ram and probably wouldn’t even need to be that big.
I was also thinking SSD’s in RAID-0 might be a possibility but even then it’s nowhere near as quick as NVme and they will likely wear out pretty quickly.