Interesting PCIe 4.0 M.2 carrier card

[Elliot Dierksen]

I just saw this on Ars Technica, and it looks interesting. Not sure when it will be generally available.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...card-that-holds-up-to-21-pcie-4-0-ssds-168tb/

 

[Ericloewe]

That thing... Yeah, that's an expensive toy rather than something suitable for serious work of any kind, really. It's oversubscribed by more than 5:1; M.2 SSDs these days love to throttle like crazy when they get hot, so putting 21 of them in close proximity is sure to be fun; maintenance looks like a monster of a headache,,,

It's a solution in search of a problem.

• Need capacity? Go for U.2 or the new and still exotic form factors with Es in them.
• Need speed? This is no better than four good SSDs.
• Need tons of SSDs for some reason that is not remotely practical? Maybe this is the product you've been looking for.

 

[Etorix]

Cooling the ten hot PCIe 4.0 drives inside the sandwich is certainly going to be "interesting"…
As would be finding a business case for a $2800 card when the same amount of money goes a good way into buying a whole server with a backplane of the same capacity (without drives).

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

The absolutely incredible side effect of all NVMe, e.g. U.2, systems is:

• no HBA
• so no RAID vs. HBA discussion, anymore
• each storage device is its own PCIe device
• so we can build all sorts of chimeras with ESXi and PCIe passthrough and an incredible number of storage devices ...

Win, win, win ...

 

[Ericloewe]

You sicko, just because you don't want to pay tribute to Broadcom and Microchip before you can attach storage to your server, doesn't mean everyone wins. Think of their shareholders!