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Fixstars launches 3TB capacity 2.5-inch SATA3 SSD

by Mark Tyson on 18 February 2015, 10:34

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Fixstars Corp. has launched what it claims to be the highest capacity 2.5-inch SATA SSD. The Japanese firm, with offices in Silicon Valley, mainly runs its business around software parallelization/optimization solutions, so it is a little surprising to see this name on an SSD hardware product, out of the blue. However yesterday it announced the start of sales of its 3TB SSD-3000M, and 1TB SSD-1000M, in North America. The drives were apparently launched in Japan last November.

To manufacture the SSD-3000M 3TB SSD Fixstars says it used flash memory designed for use in "small-scale mobile devices," fitting them into a standard 2.5-inch form factor "free of heat and performance issues".

These SATA3 drives boast performance figures of sequential reading at up to 520MB/s and writing at up to 500MB/s. Using its software expertise Fixstars claims to offer "consistently high performance," so write performance doesn't drop, for example, after a few seconds. This makes Fixstars drives eminently suitable for video and broadcasting equipment, medical imaging device and big data analysis. The NAND controller in the drives offers excellent performance with uncompressed data too.

Fixstars compiled the above performance charts.

Looking at the hardware specifications of the drives we are told that the SSDs use 19nm MLC NAND, they connect to your system via the SATA 6Gbps interface, they weigh in at under 115g and measure 100mm x 70mm x 9.5mm. TRIM is supported if your OS supports it, as is Garbage Collection and S.M.A.R.T. The drives consume less than 3W when idle, under 5W when active and under 6.2W working in boost mode.

Currently Fixstars sells the 3TB SSD-3000M, and 1TB SSD-1000M and will be launching a 5TB version called the 5000M before Q1 2015 is over. If you are wondering about pricing, the Fixstars order quote page lists a base price of US$990 + tax for the 1TB SSD-1000M.



HEXUS Forums :: 17 Comments

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Expensive but finally caught up with HDD sizes.

It's now a matter of time :)
Currently Fixstars sells the 3TB SSD-3000M, and 1TB SSD-1000M and will be launching a 5TB version called the 5000M before Q1 2015 is over. If you are wondering about pricing, the Fixstars order quote page lists a base price of US$990 + tax for the 1TB SSD-1000M.
Just schlepped over the Best Buy site and they'll sell you a 960GB Transcend for $479, or Amazon US have a 1TB Samsung 850 Evo for $419, so I'm less than impressed with the Fixstars pricing.

Think I'll wait until the major players, (Samsung, Sandisk, Crucial, etc), get the >1TB drives out there. By the way Amazon US' price for the 2TB Sandisk is $2960.54, so the prices will have to fall (a lot!) before I'm interested.
this is great news! so it shouldn't be too long till I can replace my 3 x 2tb drives in my laptop with 3 x 5tb SSD's, more space and much faster speed. or a new laptop with just a couple of 5tb SSD's would be pretty amazing too, as laptops that allow you to use 3 HDD's aren't so common and my current 17" does weigh a tonne
Yet we can't get 1TB on a M.2 stick
directhex
Yet we can't get 1TB on a M.2 stick

Take it up with the corps. Samsung had a 1TB mSATA SSD. Now they won't even sell their PCI-E M.2 SSDs to the public. There's no good reason that's preventing them from releasing bigger SSDs, just incompetence or greed.

Sod the lot of them.