At least some vendors are already doing that. The Dell 730xd will take up to 4 PCIe SSDs in regular hard drive bays - http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/poweredge-r730xd/pd Nick On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 3:26 PM, Eugeniu Patrascu <eugen@imacandi.net> wrote:
On Sat, May 9, 2015 at 9:55 PM, Barry Shein <bzs@world.std.com> wrote:
On May 9, 2015 at 00:24 charles@thefnf.org (charles@thefnf.org) wrote:
So I just crunched the numbers. How many pies could I cram in a rack?
For another list I just estimated how many M.2 SSD modules one could cram into a 3.5" disk case. Around 40 w/ some room to spare (assuming heat and connection routing aren't problems), at 500GB/each that's 20TB in a standard 3.5" case.
It's getting weird out there.
I think the next logical step in servers would be to remove the traditional hard drive cages and put SSD module slots that can be hot swapped. Imagine inserting small SSD modules on the front side of the servers and directly connect them via PCIe to the motherboard. No more bottlenecks and a software RAID of some sorts would actually make a lot more sense than the current controller based solutions.