multiple mSATA 3.5" bay mount?

[DaPlumber]

This came up in an offline discussion.

Does such a beast exist? I'm thinking of something that would let you mount at least 4 full or half-length mSATA SSD cards in a 3.5" bay and expose their interfaces as regular JBOD SATA ports with a common power connector.

 

[anodos]

You might be able to find a way to put two of these into a 3.5" bay:.
It would probably require a hardware mod (drilling a few extra holes) and will use two power connectors.

 

[DaPlumber]

Two of those and some standoff nuts might work, thanks! I'll see how desperate my friend is.

Opinions? My evil mind immediately went to: Would 4 mSATA drives make for a killer FreeNAS vdev presuming one could get a good deal on bulk mSATA cards for about the same $/GB of a bigger SSD?

 

[anodos]

Two of those and some standoff nuts might work, thanks! I'll see how desperate my friend is.

Opinions? My evil mind immediately went to: Would 4 mSATA drives make for a killer FreeNAS vdev presuming one could get a good deal on bulk mSATA cards for about the same $/GB of a bigger SSD?

With multiple ssds I would probably go with mirrors instead of RAIDZ, and spread the mirrors between those cards so that a card failure won't take down your pool. You'd probably need a 10 gigabit network to properly test it though.

 

[DaPlumber]

Oh indeedy if one was serving it up to the LAN 10GbE would be required. I was thinking more in terms of things that run in jails that could use the speed boost. VBox and transcoding video sprang immediately to mind. ISCSI boot disks might benefit?

 

[Ericloewe]

iSCSI would almost certainly benefit from the reduced impact of fragmentation if things are lined up properly. That sounds to me like a big if, but I have nothing beyond intuition to offer.