Dell and SSD drives

[Brian_Pickering at selinc.com]

Even faster than the iRAM or the other DRAM based SATA ones, which are 
usually limited to 200-250MB/sec, is the FusionIO ioDrive <
http://www.fusionio.com> PCIe cards.  They bypass SATA/SAS altogether and 
attach a Flash disk directly to a high speed PCIe port.  They aren't 
cheap, about $3000 for an 80GB model last I checked, and only support 
64bit Linux kernels right now, but they are pretty much the fastest thing 
next to a SAN with a ton of cache.  120k IOPS and upwards of 700MB/sec on 
one of these.

One step down in price would be a Intel X25-E 32GB SATA SSD at around 
$500ea.  These can do about 200MB/sec and a few thousand IOPS, equivalent 
to about a dozen 15krpm SAS drives.  If you have 2.5" trays in that 
server, they would fit right in those, but if you had 3.5" ones I don't 
think there are any adapters that would fit the hotswap bays that I've 
seen.

From:
Adam Nielsen <adam.nielsen at uq.edu.au>
To:
Stephen John Smoogen <smooge at gmail.com>
Cc:
"linux-poweredge at lists.us.dell.com" <linux-poweredge at lists.us.dell.com>
Date:
01/28/2009 04:28 PM
Subject:
Re: Dell and SSD drives



>> 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.

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