I was raised in Kokomo, Indiana. It's not the technology hot bed you might have imagined. As Indiana's 12th largest city I still remember when Wal-Mart came to town. The town was buzzing because larger cities already had Wal-Mart. People would drive from Kokomo to other cities to shop at Wal-Mart since Wal-Mart offered products below retail pricing. Before Wal-Mart and other megastores, retail shopping was just a way of life. Sure, stores still had sales, clearance items and such, but across the shelves, discount pricing was fairly rare.

Then the internet arrived in all of its greatness. The largest store in the world is now the internet and it's accessible in the smallest village in Africa to the largest city in the USA. If you sell a product, chances are you offer it for sale on the internet and if you don't, someone else sells that product on the internet. Global competition and even regional competition has changed the way we shop for products and the old retail, MSRP model has been eliminated for nearly every product SKU in the world.

Today we are looking at a product that is a throwback to the old retail, MSRP model. I say that because the company selling the Racer Series 1 SSD is an established company dating back to the old retail, MSRP days. VisionTek is one of the oldest video card companies still in existence today, at least in the United States. I remember buying VisionTek products at CompUSA, a retail establishment that eventually was swallowed up by an internet giant. When retail was a viable model for technology, VisionTek was in all of the gaming and technology stores - EB Games, CompUSA and so on. VisionTek is still in Best Buy, but according to market analysts, Best Buy is in bad shape now too.