Four of these drives deliver 4TB in the same space as a standard 3.5-inch HDD.

via HPCwire: pureSilicon Debuts 1TB 2.5-Inch SSD.

Is that right?  Four 2.5-inch drives in the place of one 3.5-inch drive?

If so, in systems that can hold 48 3.5-inch drives, then could we fit 192 of these 2.5-inch, 1 TB drives?  If those 48-drive systems fit in 4U of rack space and we put 10 of them in one rack, we could get 1,920 TB in one rack.  That’s incredible density.

According to the stats at the at the article above, this rack would require about 9.2 kW of power when active and only 192 Watts (yes, Watts) when idle.  Of course this considers only the drives’ power consumption.

At 240 MB/s read and 215 MB/s write per drive, we’d have incredible I/O rates per 192-drive system.  Imagine the performance of such systems for large OLTP databases, for example.

So what are the challenges with such a system (besides price, I’d imagine)?  With one drive potentially nearly saturating the theoretical SATAII bus capability, how could we take advantage of so many drives?

Instead of a 192-drive in a system in 4U then, what about 48 drives in a 1U system?  Are the same technical challenges there as far as getting more of the I/O potential out of these drives?