A while ago I tried to buy one to play with it, they quoted me $3000 and it is well above my personal budget for playing with it. It is only attainable by a university or a company not mere persons.
I really wish I could get my hands on an SSD that I could program the firmware for to play with things. It would require more than one sample or at least the ability to replace the flash modules since it's likely I'll burn through them with the initial failed attempts. The OpenSSD I looked at did have replaceable flash modules.
It's a low volume PCIex card, those aren't cheap to make. There are some cheaper alternatives, maybe you could adapt this firmware to run on one of the cheaper cards.
If there was an option to take an existing high volume product and get the tools and interface documentation to create and modify the firmware for I'd jump on that bandwagon as well. So far I didn't find anything like that.
You probably need to do a bit of reverse-engineering, but the project has released the firmware source code and controller programming information, so go for it!
I really wish I could get my hands on an SSD that I could program the firmware for to play with things. It would require more than one sample or at least the ability to replace the flash modules since it's likely I'll burn through them with the initial failed attempts. The OpenSSD I looked at did have replaceable flash modules.