@29821632 Nice! I've seen those before and always wondered if people had used them for DB servers and such! It would have made a lot of sense to!

Since the datasheet does not explain how it powers down safely while keeping hold of it's data, we can take a look inside.

We can see 8 super capacitors, Each one 2.5V and 110F(!)

The case is clearly milled, this was very likely not a cheap device.

Below the power board is the actual control board, This contains 8GB of DDR3 DRAM, and 8GB of NAND spread over many chips (likely to reduce the time needed to transfer the RAM to the NAND)

At the heart of it is a Virtex 5 XC5VFX100T, a FPGA that seems to go for at least £4000 (4,900 USD ish). Mostly proving that this was a very... very expensive device.

I assume the real world use case for this was a database server or for WAL logs, something that needed to be fast, power safe, and not wear out (since DDR3 does not wear out like NAND does)

Regardless, I need to actually hook this thing up to a SAS device to check that it still works. Just need to find the correct cables

@benjamineskola likely yes, SSD/NAND does wear out, and still has latency/speed limits to it. While this removes it to the point where the SAS12G link is the bottleneck

The FPGA in this thing seems overkill, but also maybe 12G SAS and 23μs iops latency needs something like this?

Huge device though, I assume reasonably huge power draw too.

It seems that not many of these were made, since one of the serial numbers on the drive suggested it was #4000 ish

@sfoskett I read some of your articles when researching what I had just bought :)