The world's first 6TB Solid State Drive (Fixstars SSD-6000M) is accepting orders and it will be shipped to customers in the United States in late July. That's the news from Fixstars, which has announced a 2.5" SSD with a capacity of 6TB. The announcement on Thursday said it was the world's largest 2.5-inch SATA SSD. The Fixstars SSD-6000M will use 15nm flash memory packed into a 2.5″ form factor. Read speeds are expected to be up to 540MB/s and write speeds of up to 520MB/s for sequential access.

Fixstars in the announcement said that, "As with the Fixstars SSD-3000M," the proprietary SSD controller enables stable, high I/O performance for sequential access throughout the lifetime of the drive. This has been very effective, said the company, in video recording, medical imaging, big data analysis, network infrastructure and industrial applications.

SlashGear's JC Torres summed up what he found so special about the debut, namely, size. "Fixstars claims it just one upped the industry. At least for now. The 6 TB of its upcoming SSD-6000M might not sound that much in the face of 8 TB drives, but it has one thing no other SSD can claim: a 2.5-inch size." He said larger 4 or 8 TB SSDs are usually used for servers or racks, but a 2.5-inch 6 TB SSD "is definitely something worth bragging about."

The SSD-6000M "grows" the company's product line. Satoshi Miki, the CEO said that "Since our SSD's capacity is now able to compete with high-end hard drives, we feel our product can draw the attention of data centers as well." Earlier this year, Fixstars announced it had started sales to North American markets of 1TB SSD-1000M and 3TB SSD-3000M solid state drives.

And now for the 6TB SSD… but at what price? Information was not yet available. Ubergizmo 's Adnan Farooqui made the point on Sunday that "Those who would rather use SSDs than HDDs are however limited in their options, because high capacity SSDs are still not mainstream and they're also very expensive.

Matthew Humphries, senior editor for Geek.com, similarly made the point that SSDs still carry a much higher price than hard drives, "but the benefits in terms of speed and power use are clear, and in a lot of cases worth the added cost," he added. (The company's subhead to its Thursday announcement read, "Speed up your application with consistent, fast sequential throughput.") As for who would snap up the 6TB SSDs, Humphries noted the growing demand in the market for large SSDs in the datacenter.

JC Torres in SlashGear said that this type of storage isn't targeted primarily at consumer devices like laptops anyway. "At least not yet. Fixstars envisions that its SSD-6000M will be utilized in cases where stable sequential data access is required, like in multimedia processing, medical imaging equipment, or big data analysis."

Fixstars is now accepting orders; shipping will take place in the U.S. in late July.

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