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]

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



random, halfbakery