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Aha, that's my cue! There are a few methods of cutting the price of larger SSDs although they are somewhat risky. Remember the manufacturing efficiency boosting method of making a high end product then lopping bits off? It's in use with SSDs too, for example there's a certain Kingston drive that uses exactly the same controlling hardware as the very nice Intel X-25M 80GB (which tend to cost about £175 iirc) however it has half the NAND chips meaning slower speeds and lower capacities. It is possible to buy these chips from places such as Digi-key and surface-mount-solder them back on giving you the high grade SSD for £125.If that seems a bit too risky and you have the time you could always create your own controller chip using an FPGA with plenty of pins, a friend of mine was looking into it for creating a physical RAM drive and it seemed like the process was transferable, using his chip switching method where only one chip is addressed at a time it would be possible to have hugely extendable drives for the price of a cable and some flash memory which was iirc £9.50 per 8GB chip and £20 per 16GB chip, the only issue is of course that random reads/writes suffer a bit but a decent cache can solve that.
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