14 DAY TRIAL // Solid state drives using the 2.5-inch form factor rarely go over 512 GB, and most of the ones that sell have 128 GB or 256 GB capacities. There are some higher-density ones out there though, and Fixstars has just released the grandmother of all high-capacity solid state drives.
Called SSD-3000M, the product has just as much storage capacity as the name suggests: three thousand megabytes, or three terabytes.
That is a lot of space. Even on the hard disk drive market that capacity would be considered on the high side, on the consumer front.
Granted, 4 TB drives have been seen in the news a lot more, and there are now even 6 TB and 8 TB units, but 3 TB is a high capacity regardless. For a 2.5-inch SSD to possess such an amount of free bytes is remarkable.
The Fixstars 3TB SSD-3000M
This solid state drive is made from 19nm NAND Flash chips and is like a dream come true for businesses and enterprises that need fast-access storage but are limited by rack space.
The extra data density is accompanied by reduced energy and maintenance costs as well, since the 2.5-inch SSD does not require more power than any other drive.
Performance is considerably high as well, reaching 520 MB/s when reading and 350 MB/s when writing. And that's only the standard mode. The boost mode allows for 520 MB/s and 500 MB/s, respectively.
All the while, the unit consumes less than 5W of energy on a voltage of 4.75V to 5.25V (±5%). In idle mode, the power draw falls to 3W, but in boost mode it goes to 6W. Not that big a difference, even when taken cumulatively with the consumption of all other SSDs in a server or data center.
Garbage collection technology is included, as is TRIM support and SMART (self-monitoring and reporting technology).
Availability
Backed by a 1-year warranty, the Fixtstars 3TB SSD-3000M should be available for order to businesses right now, for a price that will only be revealed by the company when contacted. Alternatives to the drive include a 1 TB SSD already for sale and a 5 TB SSD that will only be launched some time later this quarter (Q1 2015), which means any time up to the end of March.
"The SSD-3000M/1000M were released in Japan last November, and have been getting great feedbacks from our customers," said Satoshi Miki, CEO & Co-Founder of Fixstars Corporation (Tokyo). "As an innovator of storage solutions, we are focused on providing high performance and reliability SSD solutions, to accelerate our customer's business."