The applications for which these drives are intended require lots of stuff you can't get by just striping some 30GB Vertex drives. These are the real MaxIOPS, and they'd actually kinda suck for desktop/light workloads. You don't really see the performance until you hammer the snot out of them. You r level load times aren't going to get any lower with 20 grand worth of SLC. In fact, the best enterprise drive for desktop workloads is probably the X-25 E. I only own one, and I wish I had 7 more. Organizations that need FusionIO performance will probably not care about the price as much as the value aspect, in addition to the more massive amount of money spent in other hardware to go with it. Not to mention the astounding sum of the software...