Permalink Submitted by Cory Snavely (not verified) on February 16, 2010
The approximate pricing at the time we looked into this (November 2008) was for a 2TB fiber-attached flash-based SAN from Texas Memory Systems. These systems have full management capabilities, striping, parity redundancy and hot-swappable components, DDR cache, wear leveling, etc. That's why the cost per GB of this sort of approach doesn't compare to that of just raw SSD storage devices.
Using raw devices is one way to go, but at our scale we would want them to be aggregated by some sort of managed controller unit. The thought of installing commodity SSDs into a JBOD or SCSI/SATA hardware RAID array did cross our minds :), but we decided against that approach because the internal components had not been designed to work with SSDs, and so would likely not maximize performance.
Re: The price of Solid State Drives