Crazy ZFS ZIL options: md(4) umass(4)

[grarpamp]

Still digesting this thread in free time.
There are some articles too...

http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Evil_Tuning_Guide
http://www.slideshare.net/relling/zfs-tutorial-lisa-2011
http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2010/07/solaris-zfs-synchronous-writes-and-zil-explained
http://dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2009/06/26/slog-screenshots/
https://espix.net/~wildcat/txt/zfs-fragmentation.txt
http://pthree.org/2012/12/06/zfs-administration-part-iii-the-zfs-intent-log/
http://www.techforce.com.br/news/layout/set/print/linux_blog/zfs_part_4_sustained_random_small_files_sync_write_iops

Whatever happened to the old ISA ExpandedDRAM drives?
Today, bus based internal boards given mobo support of lots of ram
don't seem to make too much sense. But there has to be a cheap
SATA interface version of these things... a drive tray where you can
just stuff it with DIMMs and a battery.
Cheap as in, am I missing an entire class of $20-$50 devices
here? That's all they should cost in parts (minus ram), yet all I
see are $multikilo 'enterprise' stuff. If that's really the case one
could make them from China.

I can't see burning up an SSD (cost) for non-enterprise use.
I'll test with USB to expose failure modes. Will probably end up with
RAMZIL/syncdisable or adding a 10k spindle pair.