Ya, its def. cheaper than retail but that seller/those have not sold at all in the last 2 months, might be around 3 months now actually and only 1 sold. I've kept an eye on them
If the 1U were more common 'great deals' def. would be worthwhile, wish they were part of the 2U intel that was another rare deal but allow a lot more drive/capacity
Contrary to what might seem standard to those deeply focused on cutting edge tech, I think the majority of both the average IT dept employee and the general public are completely in the dark about NVMe.. particularly when the conversation starts to move towards high capacity/density deployment.
When the Broadcom 9400 cards were about to be released I reached out to the IT dept of a friend’s mid-size industrial electric equipment company for an inside track on pre-release hardware. Not only were they completely clueless with regard to why I would have any interest in such obscenely priced storage, but they were also almost completely in the dark concerning NVMe in general. Until the cost of NVMe drives comes down significantly and the availability of NVMe related hardware drastically increases, I would expect the market for non-authorized-dealer, EBay sourced “enterprise” NVMe high density storage to remain fairly limited.
M.2 appeals to the gaming segment. 1x or 2x u.2 drives are easily utilized by the non or semi-enterprise segment. Realistically (and excludimg members of STH.com or similar communities) I doubt there are all that many non enterprise buyers ready to deploy 4x/8x/12x/24x+ 2.5” NVMe drives..
Point being, just because they haven’t sold on eBay doesn’t necessarily guarantee that it isn’t a good deal.
Paint it red, add a few LED’s and heatsinks, and market the kit as a “Super Duper 8GB/s Gaming Storage Module- Extreme Series” and I bet they’ll be gone in a day.
EDIT- Not trying to pick a fight.. Just a good spirited debate