This has certainly already been a very interesting year with a bunch of new impressive solid state drives hitting the market. We’ve previously seen Fixstars 3TB and 5TB drives being released, Kingston released their new Predator PCIe SSD and Intel blew everyone away with their SSD 750 NVMe drive.
Now Fixstars is back to blow us away again with the world’s largest capacity 2.5-inch standard form factor drive, sporting an incredible 6TB capacity. The drive does go beyond the more common 7mm drive height and instead uses the 9.5mm height that most 2.5-inch HDDs come in. Fixstars used that all that space and packed it with 15nm MLC NAND. Fixstars did not specify which brand of NAND they were using, but with 15nm technology it can really only be either Toshiba or SanDisk that jointly developed this.
The drive is said to perform pretty well despite the capacity with sequential read reaching up to 540 MB/s and writes reaching up to 520 MB/s. The figures come directly from Fixstars and the test environment wasn’t specified, neither was the random 4K performance (IOPS), but I’m sure those specifications will be released as the launch gets closer. The drive also supports all the basic features such as NCQ, TRIM, and SMART.
Fixstars backs the drive with a 3-year warranty and it is expected to launch in July this year. The 6TB SSD is designed mainly for video storage, medical applications, big data analytics, communications infrastructure and other industrial applications, but that doesn’t stop us power users from enjoying it too, if the price is right.
