So that's what happened to Seagate's SSDs

[Mark R]

So, I thought that their Pulsar drive (an SLC drive with Sandforce SAS controller) was just vaporware. Maybe not quite. It turns out they're being sold in 6-packs by various high-end storage vendors.

And, by 6 pack - I mean 6 of them on RAIDed on a PCI-E 8x card!

It boasts some pretty cool specs too for the 300 GB model:
1.2 GB/s random write (64k)
200k write IOPS

Oh - and the card looks like it means business too - as you might expect with 6 1.8" SAS drives mounted on it.
LSI SSS6200

With speeds on a par with Fusion IO's fastest model, this thing looks brutal. I suspect the price is brutal too. 🙂

 

[RebateMonger]

So, the 1980's "HardCard" makes a comeback?

(Small MFM hard drive mounted on an ISA card, for those who don't remember them. They were quite a few makers, but they never became very popular because of their infexibilty and relatively high cost. I think I only saw one installed in a PC. The original developer (Plus Development) was purchased by Quantum around 1992.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard

 

[sandorski]

So, the 1980's "HardCard" makes a comeback?

(Small MFM hard drive mounted on an ISA card, for those who don't remember them. They were quite a few makers, but they never became very popular because of their infexibilty, card size, and relatively high cost. I think I only saw one installed in a PC. The original developer (Plus Development) was purchased by Quantum around 1992.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard

hehe, sorta I suppose. Biggest difference being that they were just a convenient way to add a HD to a system without buying or configuring a Controller for them.

 

[Emulex]

the problem is bringing the power and dissipating the heat of those concentrated flash boards. plus in an enterprise environment - nobody wants to have to slide a server out to pull a pci-e card if there is a problem. hot swap is quite nice if you value the uptime.

heat dissipation is designed into the existing 3.5 or 2.5 slots - power distribution as well - and redundancy (most servers connect to a sas controller with 2 or 4 (4 lane) cables (dual ported sas is de facto these days) so if you run raid-10 you can lose an entire tray (4 of 8) drives and still rock on.

We just need to wait a few months for a x16 pci-e ssd raid controller with some trim lovin'.

Also if you haven't noticed most pci-e RAMDISK/FLASHDISK solutions are software-raid/software managed - which is cool but if it takes 1-2 core to handle leveling/raid and 1-2 gb of ram (like a video card) for stupid fast i/o - that can be a deal breaker.

biggest problem is heat - slim machines don't have enough airflow over the pci express slots and putting a single fan on a enterprise device (why everything is heat-pipe/passive cooling).

 

[corkyg]

I had two of those hard cards - a 10MB and a 20MB. Hot stuff in 1985!

The real problem for Seagate was cited by Rebate Monger in the hybrids thread. Seagate is not a memory maker, so they basically don't have in house the stuff SSDs are made out of. They would have to team or acquire.

 

[capeconsultant]

LOL that is hysterical! Just like I wanted the hard card I want this puppy NOW! 🙂

So, the 1980's "HardCard" makes a comeback?

(Small MFM hard drive mounted on an ISA card, for those who don't remember them. They were quite a few makers, but they never became very popular because of their infexibilty and relatively high cost. I think I only saw one installed in a PC. The original developer (Plus Development) was purchased by Quantum around 1992.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard