Re: how to configure my new server

On Thu, 06 Feb 2003 19:07:30 -0500 in message <200302070007(dot)h1707Us06536(at)winwood(dot)sysdetect(dot)com>, Seth Robertson <seth(at)sysd(dot)com> wrote:
>
> In message <137343446(dot)1167578047(at)[4(dot)42(dot)179(dot)151]>, eric soroos writes:
>
> As a somewhat on topic thought, it would be really neat to have a
> pci card that was one slot for ram, one for compact flash, a
> memory/ide controller and battery. Fill the ram and cf with
> identical sized units, and use it as a disk for WAL. if the power
> goes off, dump the ram to cf. Should be able to do thousands of
> writes per sec, effectivley moving the bottleneck somewhere else.
> It's probably $20 worth of chips for the board, but it would
> probably sell for thousands.
>
> How is this not provided by one of the many solid state disks?

$20 worth of chips. The selling for thousands is what is provided by SSDs. A pci interface.

> http://www.storagesearch.com/ssd.html

Solid state disks are sold by companies targeting the military and don't have prices on the website. That scares me.

The pci board would need about the same circuitry as a north+southbridge on an everyday motherboard, current chip cost is in the tens of dollars. Assuming that the demand is low, call it $100 or so for a completed board. support pc-100 (much faster than a pci bus) and cf type 2 (3? allow microdrives) and you've got something like 512mb of storage for $300. Which is almost exactly my WAL size. Compared to a raid card + 2 ide drives, price is a wash and performance is limited by the pci bus.

There's one board like this w/o the flash, but it's something like $500-1000 depending on ultimate capacity, without ram.

> I have never puchased one of these due to cost ($1 per MB or more) but
> I always assumed this was a direct fit. The solid state disk people
> claim so as well on their marketing literature. One of the drives
> claims 700MB/s bandwidth.

I was seeing prices start in the low thousands and go up from there. Out of my budget I'm afraid. I'm in the process of spending ~ $500 on a drive system. The desire is to switch from raid card + 4 ide drives to my wish card + a raid card + 2 drives. (note that I'm talking in mirrored drives). I'm guessing that I could move the bottleneck to either the processor or pci bus if these cards existed.

eric