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DIY SSD (version 3)

iSCSI RAM Drive Farm
 
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In the quest for low-latency storage on a $10 budget (just for fun), the proposed idea uses a farm of obsolete computers. Each computer would be configured with a near-minimal installation of an open-source operating system and a RAM drive (of perhaps a half gig or a gig) configured as an iSCSI target. The machines would be wired together on a 100MB switch (because Gigabit doesn't give you appreciably faster latency and because 100MB is getting cheap). A master host machine would have each of the iSCSI targets partitioned as "physical" volumes for a logical volume group. The group would then be partitioned with one logical volume spanning the sum of them. (Striping wouldn't make a lot of sense since they'd be competing for the host's network bandwidth.... unless link aggregation or a gigabit NIC is involved).

I might actually do this in my garage and see what happens.

kevinthenerd, May 31 2012

It's the Latency, Stupid http://rescomp.stan.../rants/Latency.html
If you have latency (on drives or networks), you're stuck with it. [kevinthenerd, Jun 01 2012]

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       You realize that's it's actually 100Mb, as in megabits, translating to 12.5 megabytes per second? Even the slowest hard drives you can currently buy can do several times that speed.
ytk, May 31 2012
  

       I'm chasing latency, not bandwidth. If you'd like, a single 1Gb connection would give you 125MB/s, and six of them aggregated would give you SATA-3 bandwidth (ignoring all of the protocol overheads in a slapdash comparison). The latency wouldn't improve, unfortunately.
kevinthenerd, Jun 01 2012
  
      
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