Which is exactly the point with the boot drive sitting in the chassis separate from the magnetic drives. It is a low power device capable of responding quickly when needed. When not needed it sips power.
As for swapping and logging I'm really hoping Apple isn't doing this to a SSD.
if the SSD drive is the only drive in the box when shipped, where else would the swapping and logging go???
Swapping is a form of caching. So that's fine as long as the swap block size is some multiple of the SSD write block size. Although you are wearing the drive out if excessively swap. The bigger problem is that the log ( security and all the normal unix/BSD logs ) that get written out likely in much smallere chunks and recycled are likely to chew up write lifetime also at a rate larger then of the amount of data written. Also probably not much of a problem over a 3 year lifespan as long as not many other larger write lifetime consumers.
What the OS does with the disk is very dependent upon use. For some applications the SSD could be a win if boot and applications run from it.
launching applications is more of a sequential read problem than a random read one. Boot is slightly different because lots of different files are being read. But boot faster..... If you booting your server alot you have bigger issues than the disk drives. Should be seeing uptimes in terms of months if not years. Optimizing what do in those kind of time frames is a curious priority ordering.
I think you are missing two important points. One is that a SSD can lower your power budget. Some apps thrive on platforms that have data and code storage separated.
How did a miss the point when I said power was a benefit right there at the top? And if your sever ships with just on OS boot drive that is SSD internal to the box... exactly where is all the data the applications consume being stored?
SDD drives have been and will continue to be MORE expensive than Hard drives. This is a very similar hyperbole that happened several years ago when folks said tape drives were dead and that all back up would be done to hard drives. Hard Drives aren't likely to completely disappear. As long as folks requirements for retained data keep going up into the terabyte and up range never going to be completely able to store all of your data onto SSD drives. Just a subset. SSD still has an order of magnitude to come down in price.
Read this article by Adam Leventhal
http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/hybrid_storage_pools_in_cacm
http://mags.acm.org/communications/200807/?pg=49
I can't disagree with the idea that PCI-Express is a better place for SSD storage and by extension that SATA is pretty much a dead end.
Again spinning hard drives are not dead. Neither are CDs and DVDs. Spinning media is going to be around for a long while. What I am saying that to
maximize performance from a SSD drive SATA and SAS suffer. Primarily because their upper limits are bounded buy the rotational limitations.
The higher than 15K rpm drives are probably dead. But the slower spinning ones can be made cheaper and more dense than the SSDs.
However, just like there is a market for SAS and SATA drives there will be tiers. Some folks who don't need max speed and are more price sensitive so may go with the cheaper drive and get SATA SSD drives. However, doing RAID 0 of SSD SATA drives... if the SATA interface is the bottleneck... chuck it. Not buy more "drives".
The problem is as you point out no Mac hardware. In the meantime we are very much on the bleeding edge of SSD systems and as such better hardware is arriving every few months. Most of this hardware is on SATA so ideally you would be able to readily implement it on an Apple server.
Don't need "mac hardware", need drivers. Fusion I/O cards work in Linux and Windows. If there was a mac driver (on card for EFI and in OS so can present as drive) would have the hardware also.
Again can use SATA. It certainly appears that Apple is stick there SSD drive on a SATA interface. However, you are NOT going to get max performance out of it. If you want to use it to speed up the the other parts of the disk storage hierarchy you'd want to.
As to SSD performance in a server that requires knowing the specifics to determine value. In any event for the right app SSD can be a performance advantage even on SATA.
You never get something for nothing. The downside on SSDs is that they can wear out faster than hard drives. Especially if do an unusually large amount of writing.
Long term yes there is the fact that SATA is a dead interface. It simply can't keep up with the fastest SSD technology.
Spinning disk technology has had 2-3+ interfaces that have lived in parallel over the years. Right now that is SATA , SAS , and FC. Nothing says that SSD just has to have just one. In fact, the opposite. SDD is going to have very similar segmented economic driving forces.
However until a standard card format comes around (supporting hot swap for example) we will have to live with SATA and it's limitations.
Can hot swap PCI cards now in servers and OS that support it. Apple doesn't, but that doesn't mean can't right now. IBM, Sun, etc. boxes do that now.
The thing that bothers me is the apparent restriction on running alternative drives. At some point the person implementing the alternative drive will have a better idea than Apple as to it's suitability. Frankly excessive restrictions just limit the potential applications for the hardware.
You can run alternative hard drives now. Poke around the internet for directions. Just don't ask Apple for support if it doesn't work.
KVMs certainly work but not all operations adopt that approach. Some places simple use a stand on wheels to place a keyboard at the troubled station.
Right and how exactly do you hook up the video monitory without a visit to the back end of the machine? The USB port on the front isn't the only port.
There are more on the back. If you have to go to the back of the machine anyway to hook up the video just use one of the ones back there while you are there. All of this is mainly being too lazy to go to the back of the machine if want to hook up more than one.
Secondly with a cart, if hauling around KVM on the hard how much harder to haul around a USB port expander on the same cart? Take the one port, multiple it by 4 or 5 and no have even more ports than standard server only in this temporary situation. If your DVD drive is flakey, plug one in on USB. etc. etc.
With a more permanently hooked up KVM set up then you probably don't have to go to the back to get "turned on". So you are left with no keyboard, no mouse and just this flash drive. One port. Done.
A good choice if it cuts on a DVD and all your machines reliably read the disk.
You are in an exceptional situation. The server is hosed in some way. Otherwise have the network to get any files there. Apple's tools and the OS recovery all ship DVD ... how do you use those with flakey DVD drives?
Given how Linux performs on similar hardware I suspect that there is much Apple could do to enhance server performance. That doesn't even include working OpenCL into the equation.
OpenCL is not going to be some panacea. Sure there maybe some splashy demos that show speed ups, but it isn't going to make MySQL or SQLite or Word, etc. go substantially faster. Questionable whether it would speed up basic file or deep kernel operations either.
Secondly, if thinking going to gain equivalence with Linux then they'd need to make some hardcore changes to the Mac OS kernel. The Mach + glued on FreeBSD set up has overhead that Linux has forgone precisely because because of some of the performance downsides.
