WOW!

[jasonp]

LaurV, you appear to work in the hardware business; how many of those boards do you think the OCZ folks would need to sell to get them under, say, $1000 each?

(and I would think you'd have a lot of non-recurring engineering to recoup as well, that PCB looks pretty busy)

[schickel]

Originally Posted by jasonp

LaurV, you appear to work in the hardware business; how many of those boards do you think the OCZ folks would need to sell to get them under, say, $1000 each?

(and I would think you'd have a lot of non-recurring engineering to recoup as well, that PCB looks pretty busy)

TigerDirect has the 230GB model available at US $430.99 and the 360GB at $1234.99; Amazon is a little higher on the small one and quite lower on the larger one, though there is one seller with a new one listed @ $449.99 (?)....something seems very wrong with that price.

[LaurV]

Originally Posted by jasonp

LaurV, you appear to work in the hardware business; how many of those boards do you think the OCZ folks would need to sell to get them under, say, $1000 each?

(and I would think you'd have a lot of non-recurring engineering to recoup as well, that PCB looks pretty busy)

We manufacture for these guys, we only do production, the design is their, so the "engineering spending" is their too, and we don't make any SSD, we only do... other stuff. We did an evaluation however, for the 120Gig SSD which they wanted, our production price would be, say, below 150 bucks. Much below. No mystery, since one can buy 64Gigs for 80 bucks (new, not second hand) from ebay... (but generally not the best choice, and not the fastest, as I said, all use serial NAND Flash, and sometime lack the relocation logic*).

*edit: because the nand flash has a quite limited number of writings, clever interface circuits will always write in a different physical place, to extend the life of the flash memory. Cheap devices lack that mechanism. Any flash IC usually has some additional sectors (that is, more memory than is specified) used especially for this "relocation" purpose. Some IC's (depending on price) go to 1%, 5% or even 10% more "storage space", which is used only when and after the "main" (normal-accesible) sectors can't be written anymore, this additional memory will automatically "relocate" the defective blocks. Cheap devices lack this too.

edit 2: and to answer your question, they should sell under $1k, if it would not be for their proprietary stuff put into it (like HSDL, etc). What I would be interested is the ocz's hybrid stuff (this IS fast, much faster then the non-hybrid one, with 120k IOps, and larger too, with up to 1TB storage), despite of the fact that I can't understand how this can beat a ramdrive, for either, price, speed, etc.