I've been thinking about ways of speeding up disk I/O, and one of the bottlenecks I keep coming back to is the journal. There's an obvious benefit to using an SSD for the journal - over and above just write caching unless of course I just disable the journal with the write cache (after all devicemapper doesn't seem to support barriers). In order to get the benefits from using a BB write cache on the controller, then I'd need to disable journalling - but then the OS should try to fsck the system after an outage. Of course if the OS knows what's in the batter-backed memory then it could use it as the journal - but that means it must be exposed as a block device and only be under the control of the operating system.

However I've not been able to find a suitable low-cost device (no, write-levelling for Flash is not adequate for a journal, at least one which uses Smartmedia).

While there's no end of flash devices, disk/array controllers with BB write caches, so far I've not found anything which just gives me non-volatile memory addressable as a block storage device.