While I agree that we would all like to see the most up to date components, older components are actually a very common trade off in the industry in order to achieve aggressive pricing. Happens every day with controllers, NAND and DRAM. SM2508 is an amazing controller; we have several in hand. You still need a heatsink and it will always be the common theme of moving data at such high speeds. So I guess my question would be whether you can recommend a similar product that is available today that has the same price tag and can reach 3.7GB/s data transfer speeds by simply quickly popping an SSD in and connecting?

Too big – Single sided gen 5 NVMe’s with SM2508 controllers, won’t need fans so enclosures can be smaller, use the case as heat sink.