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  • Kevin G - Thursday, January 3, 2013 - link

    The layout of the NVDRIVE seems kinda odd. Off hand it looks like it has 8 mSATA boards: 4 hidden in that picture behind a daughter board that has 4 mSATA boards itself. Considering that there are some connectors that'll stack two high, it makes me wonder why they went with a daughter board for additional mSATA slots.

    The ultracapacitor looks like a battery backup from the picture. If that's the case, why bother having it on the PCI-e card when it could be mounted else where in a server chassis? (Several RAID controllers I've seen do this.)

    If the server market is going to go with mSATA, why not a back plane on the front of a server chassis with numerous mSATA slots that could be hot swapped? mSATA cards are narrow enough that it could be oriented vertically in the front of a 1U chassis. They're thin enough that 16 could easily be mounted up front with room for two 2.5" HD's for backup. With 256 GB mSATA cards, that'd be 4 TB of unformatted space which is a respectable amount for a 1U server.
  • PaulJeff - Thursday, January 3, 2013 - link

    I like the idea of a mSATA hot swap bay, the high density potential is great.

    That said, "SATA" is not considered "enterprise" in many IT circles. HP calls SATA "Nearline SAS" to not have to say SATA.

    Perhaps, mSAS is the way to go. But to ratify a new connector standard would be expensive and time consuming.
  • Kevin G - Thursday, January 3, 2013 - link

    The main advantage of SAS as a protocol over SATA is multipathing so that one controller can go down but the data is still accessible via a different controller.

    The mSATA form factor uses the same connector as mini-PCIe. That spec has one PCI-e defined with a provision for a second PCI-e to go over the connector. Multi-lane support could be accomplished by having each PCI-e lane go to a different controller. PCIe does allow this in their specification but I have not heard of any implementation using multiple controllers for a single slot. With SATA-Express and NVMe controllers could also use the mSATA/mini-PCIe form factor and allow for enterprise class features. I'm kinda surprised that the SATA-Express and NVMe working groups didn't converge on a common mSATA/miniPCIe spec.
  • dilidolo - Thursday, January 3, 2013 - link

    SAS advantage is full deplux vs. half duplex on SATA.
    A lot of SAS environment is not multipathed.

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