SSDs are already in the big show, and have been demonstrated reliable in those applications. The key is choose your vendors carefully, ask how they were qualified, etc.

Most of the enterprise grade SSDs on the market that are outfitted with power-loss protection circuitry fit these capacitors within the 2.5" form factor.

In these situations, I think you have to solve this problem as small as possible, with the program manager themselves. Figure out what that person feels isn't being delivered or executed on, and make sure you address that manager's needs.

Escalating around the chain of command doesn't usually work in these scenarios, especially if you're relatively new.

Each CPU supports 8 lanes of PCIe 2.0 (4GB/s) meaning it can flush and fill its 8GB (max) of main memory from an IO device every 2 seconds, if you actually had that much IO to pump.

These things are meant to live 1000/rack which is ~24 CPUs per 1U. Give each motherboard a pair of 1Gbit/s ethernet pipes, and i'm sure it's sufficient for the scaleout they expect.

These are not intended to build your normal 4U server chassis with 40 PCIe lanes.

And for the first time in 20 years of slashdot, a beowulf cluster joke was actually appropriate.

If they did that, they couldn't charge the thief for a new contract, and you for early termination.

Intel has a 5 year warranty on their 320 SSDs, longevity/reliability seem pretty good if you believe the data being published by various 3rd parties.

The above is the easiest way to do it.

Just open it up with a torx wrench, and sand the platters by hand with some 60 grit paper until they're not shiny. The magnetic dipoles only goes a few tens of nanometers deep on the surface of the platter.

6.004 was awesome, both taking it and helping teach and debug other student's projects as a lab assistant. It's was a great introduction to the basic skills required to be a firmware engineer in today's job market, since you really got to figure out, clock by clock, how a CPU operates.

Doesn't this make most operating systems illegal? Who doesn't store the password as a hashed copy?

The DDRDrive X1 almost fits your design. It's not on the memory bus, but on the PCI-e bus as a storage device. Bit pricey though per gigabyte.

My Comcast Business account explicitly allows servers on the static IP, including mail, web, etc. Anything allowed unless it's against the law in the local jurisdiction. If you go over bandwidth caps, they reserve the right to promote you automatically to the next tier of service. At the top tier, there are no caps.

It costs a little extra, but it seems to me like a business big enough to run it's own mail server should be able to afford the ~$75-100/mo for a business cable modem account.

If 100% failure rate were common, I'm pretty sure they would have long ago stopped selling SSDs. Maybe you're doing it wrong?

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2000-07-25/

Yea, the ads disabled is really annoying. I'd be okay with ads that didn't occupy so much real estate, and the inability to maximize stories to fill my browser really drives me nuts.