> What is the use case?
I realize that a lot of data centers will almost automatically
recommend a "cloud" solution for the following; however,
sometimes a data set really does warrant absolute privacy,
particularly when we are talking about confidential information
e.g. proprietary R&D, patent research, legal investigations, etc.
With that said, consider my own personal situation:
I designed and built a Windows workstation with 16GB DRAM,
and configured 13GB as a very functional ramdisk using
RamDisk Plus from
www.superspeed.com .
It's configured to SAVE and RESTORE the entire ramdisk
at SHUTDOWN and STARTUP, respectively. I am using
a RAID-0 of 4 x SanDisk Extreme Pro SSDs to store
that ramdisk image automatically, to minimize boot-up time.
But, that ramdisk is now running out of space, and
my motherboard cannot support more than 16GB of DDR2-800 DRAM.
By moving that ramdisk to a fast RAID-0 of NVMe SSDs,
I should be able to experience the same performance level,
e.g. when searching and/or indexing that data set,
and have plenty of extra room for normal growth.
Another routine task is to write a drive image of the C: system partition.
From experience, I prefer to run that task when no other programs
are running. The sooner that drive image is written, the better,
because I can go back to using that workstation for everything
else I do with it, on a daily basis e.g. Internet access, email,
website maintenance, etc.
Now, to extrapolate to a small/medium sized organization e.g. 100 workers:
if we shave just one minute from each hour of every work day,
and we do that for all 100 people in that organization,
you may be astounded by the cumulative amount of time
that is saved over one full year of 2,000 FTE hours per year per worker
(each worker is on the job 50 weeks/year x 40 hours per week).
As I recall, saving just 1 minute per hour, on average,
ends up saving 2.5 person-years (full time equivalent)
in an organization with 100 personnel.
So, what professional organization could NOT benefit
from having 2.5 full-time professional personnel
each working for an entire calendar year withOUT any pay,
benefits or other overhead?
You might argue that I am "cherry picking" here;
however, it is a fact that very small improvements
can result in accumulating large benefits over time.
I also believe that is the reason why high-performance
servers have become so valuable in any medium to
large organizations.
Of course, I am not too concerned about enhancing
the productivity of gamers; I
am concerned about
enhancing the productivity of professionals whose
time is very productive and consequently very valuable e.g.
civil engineers, database managers, research scientists, etc.
I seem to recall that even Bill Gates was heard to say,
at one (distant) point in the past, that no one would
ever need more than 640K of RAM.