Dell and SSD drives

[Adam Nielsen]

>> Perhaps another alternative is one of those i-RAM type cards, which let you
>> attach battery-backed RAM to a SATA port.  I think they'd be in the same
>> price range as an SSD, only they're a *lot* faster (apparently the SATA port
>> is the bottleneck, so ~300MB/sec read/write.)  I think they'd certainly be
>> the fastest option, however I'm not sure whether you can get them in decent
>> sizes (maybe 8-16GB?)  The battery would also guarantee persistence over
>> reboots and (short) shut downs.
> 
> Ahh thats exactly what I was looking for. Thankyou. Do you know what
> the class of 'disks' these are called?

No I don't - Gigabyte Technology made the first one (they called it the 
i-RAM) and I recall seeing another manufacturer's version a few weeks 
back.  Hopefully Google can help there.

The Gigabyte one is actually a PCI card which has a SATA connector on 
it, so you plug that from the PCI card onto the motherboard's SATA 
connector.  Not quite sure how that would work with hotswap SATA drives 
etc.  They have a CD-ROM size version too, but that probably won't fit 
in many servers.  Wikipedia has a bit on it.

Cheers,
Adam.