[Sephr]

The SM950 can be had at $300 for 512GB with 2.5/1.5 GB/s sequential read/write and 300K IOPS. RAID together 6 of them in parallel and you'll have something with better specs and storage than the 2.9TB module ($46K) for just $1.8K (albeit with less endurance, though not sure how much less).

[trhway]

IBM's margins are heavenly, no argument here. Yet what you propose is apple to oranges. The SM950 would have endurance of 1K to may be 3K writes. The IBM's flash is 10K. This is enterprise/database, not desktop, ie. you need the write endurance. It is one of the main reasons why we don't see many database servers with SSD arrays like you proposed, and instead we see huge RAM servers with RAID-ed HDDs.

[kev009]

That is bad engineering, HDDs have about the same drive writes per day as SDDs once you get into the TB sized SSDs.