> > But wired GigE to a desktop machine with the same SSD should work as well. > > I'm not sure an SSD is going to be big enough. But sequential writing on a SATA hard > drive should be way fast enough. > > Writing data directly is going to be more predictable as you're not going through all > those abstraction layers and dealing with an OS that might need to do something else.
agreed, however after some brief googling, it seems that driving SATA directly is an extremely complicated and underdocumented proposition. Plenty of companies seem eager to sell kits in the thousands of dollars that are up to the task with plenty of marketing babble that tells me nothing about whether it would actually work.