Fixstars 6Gb SATA 2.5-Inch SSD With Massive 6TB Capacity

Fixstars Solutions, Inc. has released a 6TB SSD, the SSD-6000M, which is the largest capacity SSD (as of May 7, 2015) in 2.5″ x 9.5mm form factor.

Fixstars is now accepting orders that will be shipped to customers in the United States in late July.

The 6TB drive is built on 15nm MLC flash memory which has been packed into a 2.5″ form factor.

The SSD-6000M supports 6Gb SATA, providing read speeds of up to 540MB/s, and write speeds of up to 520MB/s for sequential access.

As with the SSD-3000M, the proprietary SSD controller enables a stable, high I/O performance for sequential access throughout the lifetime of the drive.

This characteristic has proven to be effective in numerous areas such as video recording, medical imaging, big data analysis, network infrastructure, and industrial applications.

Satoshi Miki, CEO, Fixstars Corporation, offered the following comment: “The unparalleled performance of our previous model’s (SSD-3000M) sequential I/O helped propel our SSDs and garner lots of attention. Since many of our customers desire even greater capacity, I am excited to offer a new solution and grow the product line with the inclusion of the larger SSD-6000M.”

He continues: “Since our SSD’s capacity is now able to compete with high-end HDDs, we feel our product can draw the attention of data centers as well.”

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To our knowledge, the largest capacity SATA SSD launched is a model from Foremay at 8TB with 6Gb interface and released in November 2014, with 500MB/s sequential read/write speeds and 100,000 IO/s of random read/write performance.

There are other SSDs with even higher capacities but on PCie cards.

But wait for 10TB SSDs. They are on the way from Toshiba and Intel for early next year, both companies revealing new 3D NAND" memory chips that are stacked in layers to pack in more data.

Toshiba has created a 48-layer NAND, yielding a 16GB chip.

Intel and partner Micron revealed they're now manufacturing their own 32-layer NAND chips that should also arrive in SSDs in around a year.

Per comparison, the largest capacity 2.5-inch HDD is the Toshiba AL13SX, announced last January at 3TB, with 6Gb SATA interface. The internal unit, 15mm height, has 4 disks and 8 heads. The height of the Fixstars SSD-6000M is only 9.5mm, meaning that you could pack theoretically 8TB in a 15mm 2.5-inch SSD.