[SLL] Rant: ATA-over-Ethernet 0x88a2

[Glenn Stone]

On Thu, May 05, 2005 at 12:39:22PM -0700, Andrew Sweger wrote:
>On Thu, 5 May 2005, Chuck Wolber wrote:
>
>> Thus then the question arises, what *WOULD* you pay for one of these 
>> things? For me, $50 sounds a bit high, but a reasonable price nontheless.
>
>For the bare converter (IDE-to-AoE and power passthru), I think $40 retail
>is a fair price. For an integrated assembly, it really shouldn't have any
>marginal difference to the Firewire stuff in my portable drive units I
>have on the desk.

I was going to say, probably in the $75-80 range.  I could see paying a bit
of a premium on the firewire stuff... 

The price point is actually pretty easy to figure out (gods, I'm grokking
marketing?  Whoda thunkit?)... A firewire enclosure has a fair amount of
smarts, but no real OS.  A network print server has to be a full-blown
spooler, and probably has several processes running in it.  A
network-attached drive enclosure basically only has to have the kernel
running and just enough userland to configure it; once it's configured
something not entirely unlike knfsd would handle the I/O.  So if the smarts
is somewhere between a spooler and a firewire box, so must be the price, no?

I think we're going to see a lot of gadgets running off USB or IDE flash
disks in the near future, what with all the mini-Linuces running around
these days... I know at least one (rather youthful) game dev who has the
bright idea of distributing his game on a CD that contains a Feather runtime
environment... just like the old days where you ran your DOS-based games off
the CD.  

-- Glenn