Solid state drives offer the best performance on the market, and their prices are becoming friendlier every day, but the main doubts still revolve around capacity. The business world has access to SSDs of considerable size, and in the desktop realm there are many models that adopt a PCI Express interface, but the company Fixstars has announced a new 2.5-inch SSD with a not-to-be-sneezed-at 6TB capacity, the largest under that form factor.
Over the years, the world of computing has faced titanic challenges, which installed the need to develop new hardware. Every time we think “it’s enough”, something new appears that forces us to wipe the slate clean and start over. When the first Quake saw the light, our loyal 486s became carts. The same happened with F.E.A.R., and then with Crysis. Now, the arms race has extended its attention to storage. Hard drives still have an unbeatable density-cost ratio, but solid state drives are slowly improving their game. High capacity and high price are synonymous among SSDs, with examples exceeding a thousand dollars per terabyte. However, someone must break the equation despite the cost, and that someone is Fixstars, which announced its new SSD-6000M.
SSD-6000M: The Largest 2.5-Inch SSD
As its name indicates, this new product offers a capacity of 6TB (counted in decimal form, of course), but the most surprising thing is that Fixstars managed to enclose those 6TB in a 2.5-inch unit, making the SSD-6000M the largest of its kind. Apparently Fixstars has a certain preference for breaking records, since last February it had achieved something similar with its SSD-3000M, of three terabytes. The new SSD uses SATA III as its main interface, but its controller is an in-house design. In terms of performance, the SSD-6000M’s main page speaks of 540 MB/s in sequential reading, and 520 MB/s in writing under the same condition.
Availability and Target Applications
The unit is already available through a pre-order process, and deliveries will start in July. As expected, the price is not public, but Fixstars customers shouldn’t worry too much about that detail. The company highlights that the SSD-6000M is ideal for data centers, multimedia content producers (it stores almost 400 hours of 4K video in H.265), and diagnostic imaging platforms. Anyway, I don’t think we should wait too long to find such capacity in SSDs aimed at general consumers.
