I get what you're saying - but it's not SSD (solid state drive). This is faster memory fabric than even an SSD as it is not limited by a disk drive's interface and protocol.

I understand the general notion, though. If I go to my supplier for the parts - I get a costed BOM of "X" - and that number doesn't seem that large.

I can only say that there are consequences to design choices that do not only boil down to a piece-part's cost.

I'm not sure (from a pure marketing perspective) why exactly the flagship didn't try to follow a growth path of the predecessor which has internal storage for the factory set plus 2GB of expandable storage.

Speculating - probably the next bump up in size was too much of a premium to swallow considering they had to put the memory on-board (and not upsell). And perhaps more memory of the total physical pool is allocated for something other than user use and that non-user use grew relatively larger this gen. Still, I think from a gen-to-gen standpoint it's weird that you can't fit the same libraries you could fit into a Motif XF into the flagship.

And then last you have the product cannibalism issue. Once Montage was feature set - a list of have/have-nots was developed for the MO line product. What was "shaved" seems about right.

The Korg (at least Kronos) comparison is an SSD. It's off the shelf stuff. So yes, it's cheap. Yamaha doesn't have this architecture. By evolutionary progression, adding an SSD would be something like fish getting wings and becoming birds. This is stuff not quite in the Yamaha synth DNA. I'm not sure if Yamaha does or does not see SSD as an evolution or devolution. For cost, it's great. For performance - it's more limited. The way SSD (or NVMe) unravels data has to match Yamaha's algorithms and timing closure in order to pull this off. If SSDs (even NVMe) don't play nice with Yamaha's general architecture - then it'd be a lot of waiting to get this developed. Not to mention the chipsets have been fairly standardized - so there's a big core/fab cost in changing that game.

I know it's been said before that "why can't I stick a 512GB USB stick on the back of this thing and have tons of expansion space" or "why can't I have a 14TB drive dangling off this thing" are questions that are not comprehending the technology, architecture, requirements, and nuance of keyboard product design. And generally are dismissed with some amount of detail given about the other side of this. And - to those in the industry of designing electronic devices could write a lot of detail about why products may validly make these design decisions. Around the 2nd paragraph I get the feeling that eyes get glazed over. I don't want to underestimate or offend or talk down or ... you know what I mean - I don't want to be a jerk about it. I understand where the question comes from. But the question does demonstrate that it would take a lot of effort to bring those who ask how products are designed and function. And there's a lot more detail proprietary to Yamaha that goes beyond these volumes of "books" on the subject.

I hope something was useful here. I was just wishing for ~3GB of user space - not 60GB or more. But even so, I have an appreciation and speculative understanding why Montage ended up at 1.75GB which also dictates much of what MODX became.

As Jason said, MODX doesn't use SSD at all. Not all kinds of "memory" are the same and interchangeable in functionality/application, the supporting electonics required, etc.. Here's a good article about how various types of memory are arranged inside the Montage (MODX is largely the same in this respect): http://sandsoftwaresound.net/yamaha-montage-internals-revisted/

Just speculation of course but... Even if storage should be considered "cheap", i guess the big issue is the creation of high quality content to go inside that (expanded) storage area and thats where the main cost would be. This would be my guess.

But AnotherScott is on to something interesting here. Afaics, the Montage (with its 1.75MB of user storage) and the MODX do seem to be very much alike in those parts of the design, which makes me wonder if also the MODX might have that storage available (in theory) but that it is "strangled" since it is a cost-cut Montage after all...

There was a time (long ago, like 2001) when you could have a hard drive (or CD ROM) hanging off your Yamaha keyboard. The original MOTIF 8 had an 80 pin external SCSI port and you could connect a SCSI hard drive to import data (some of us had talked about possibly hacking an internal SCSI drive into the MOTIF too). The SCSI port was likely there because solid state memory was very expensive back then: the MOTIF had a massive 4 Mb sample ram expandable to 68 Mb with two 32 Mb simms, and 84 Mb of sample ROM. Removable storage was via SmartMedia cards (largest at the time was 128 Mb I recall). Any voice or performance involving external samples took a long time to load. I suspect Yamaha removed the drive ports in future keyboards because they weren't used much (I never heard of anyone using the SCSI port) and solid state chips became much cheaper. Remembering the "good old days" , I won't complain about having "only" 1 Gb of ram in my MODX.

Back in the SCSI days, I don't think rewritable persistent solid state memory was very expensive... rather, I don't think it existed! (Persistent meaning it doesn't "forget" its contents when powered down.)

And yes, the load time situation was very different. The original Motif (and ES/XS) did not have the ability to play sounds directly from the expansion storage devices (SCSI, any kind of media card), the sounds would have to be copied into RAM to use them, and they would be lost when you powered down. The Motif XF was the first to have expandable persistant memory that could store samples which could be directly accessed without loading into RAM, that was done via the 512 mb and 1 gb expansion cards (which were aboug $150 and $300 respectively, IIRC). I believe a big change here was that they patented a way to use cheaper NAND flash for this purpose in the Montage/MODX, whereas on the Motif XF/MOXF expansion cards, they used pricey NOR flash because the cheaper flash normally cannot be accessed without having its contents copied into RAM as in "the old days" (and the cost of the added RAM would offset the savings of the cheaper flash, plus slow the startup time).

"Persistent" memory was available back in the day by means of a backup battery. The Motif had SRAM (static RAM) and DRAM (dynamic RAM). SRAM was persistent because a backup battery in the synth provided power to it. DRAM contents disappeared whenever you turned the main power off. SRAM held voice, performance, and master lists and as long as you used internal waveforms (stored in ROM) all went well. Sample waveforms and unsaved voice, performance, and master edits were held in DRAM and went away on power down (unless saved to the SCSI or SmartMedia card). The associated voice name would still show up in the list on restart (Splendid Grand was a common multi layer piano using external samples) but it wouldn't sound since the sample it was linked to wasn't retained in memory. Reloading the waveform took a long, long time and you can't play sounds or do anything else while it's loading. Not good in a live situation and some people were using a UPS to keep power going to the Motif in the event something got unplugged! Happily synths have come a long way since then (but I still love my old Motif 8!).

Sorry to be slow to reply, but I have de-prioritized social media. 🙂

In addition to the article mentioned by AnotherScott, I've posted a brief tour of the MODX internal hardware, too:

http://sandsoftwaresound.net/yamaha-modx-inside-stuff/

Yamaha MODX/Montage and Korg Kronos use very different strategies and hardware. Korg Kronos is based on a commodity, dual core Intel Atom processor, commodity motherboard and a ton of software for synthesis. Samples are streamed from a commercial solid state drive.

Yamaha MODX/Montage use a Yamaha-designed tone generation (parallel) processor for synthesis, the SWP70. Cleverly, the SWP70 incorporates the data caching and control aspects of a solid state drive on-chip such that the SWP70 can use the same ONFI compliant NAND flash as a solid state drive. Choice of memory capacity is a multi-dimensional problem: marketing (product tiers, etc.) and engineering (1 flash device vs. multiple devices, board space, testing, etc.) It's hard to keep that processor fed, but it has rock-solid latency WRT Kronos or software-based approaches.

The factory sample set and user samples reside in the same physical flash devices. The specs may say "1,75GB" or whatever, but the actual physical flash memory is bigger. An inartful way way of saying this is "the expansion memory is what's left over after the factory set." 😉

Yamaha have left room for growth. The SWP70 family is the Yamaha platform for maybe the next 10 years. (!) Even Montage does not exploit all of the SWP70 ports. Stay tuned and save your pennies.

I believe that the availability of quality content (e.g., samples) is an important factor. Yamaha invests a lot of time and effort in sound design. What's ready to go at release time is what you get. 🙂

Hope this helps -- pj

P.S. The acronym "SSD" is used for both "solid state drive" and "solid state device." Gotta be specific sometimes...