I am not too much of an expert on enterprise hardware, but those are PCIe interface. I don’t know how possible it is to rack up 24 of those in a single server (you would run out of lanes).

This is something more similar to what is in those Dell servers (and there are 24 of them):

https://www.newegg.com/samsung-pm1643a-7-68tb/p/2U3-0005-000...

https://www.newegg.com/p/0N7-0133-00003

There is certainly a markup with Dell, but it’s sort of like a cloud vendor - pay for the warranty and service, and be (somewhat) hands off if something breaks.

Threadripper and Epyc has been smashing the pcie lane limit for a while now. That's why Epyc is kicking intel's ass in server applications.

My personal workstation at the side of my desk has 6 pcie nvme ssd's and I can add 4 more without breaking the lane bank.

> I don’t know how possible it is to rack up 24 of those in a single server

that's the one of points of article: Epic cpus have 128 lanes for a while, and that's how they upgraded to 24 NVMEs.

Oh yeah, the article. I guess this thread got sidetracked on the topic of Dell's pricing :). I wonder how common a 24-drive NVMe server is.

I don't know all the ins and outs of SAS vs NVMe. Maybe someone else can chime in. I am at the end of my knowledge now.

I suppose one benefit is the availability of hardware RAID controllers, as hinted in the article. But it does seem interesting that NVMe is cheaper than SAS, while theoretically having higher bandwidth.

Yeah, I feel SAS is obsolete tech, and will be replaced by NVMe everywhere going forward.

> > One thing to note is that a VAR (as mentioned elsewhere) will knock 75% off the price listed on Dell’s website.

> Makes sense.

Does it? Adding a middleman that needs to take a cut to exist reducing the price makes sense to you?