A5000: no NVRAM?

[Phil Brown]

[From V.Sander]
> Surely there are some disadvantages in the absence of NVRAM. But you
> have no controller as the original SSA series had. All is handled by
> the attached system.
> 
> The main idea of the design was, that one should stripe I/O to handle 
> performance similar - or even faster than 25 MB FC -  
> than writing to the NVRAM. Each disk is be able to deliver performance
> of 10 MB/s. One should be able to fill the FC-AL by striping disks, why
> using NVRAM?

For overall bytes/sec throuput, maybe. But what if your goal is to
complete small, fast-as-possible transactions, that all need to be
syncd to non-volatile storage before "completion"?
I don't think you can beat NVRAM, I don't care how fast your rotating
physical media is. You'll always have a minimum latency in the milliseconds,
vs microseconds.

Anyone care to argue against that?