Fixstars Releases 13 TB SSD for Specific Application Workloads
Fixstars announced a new high capacity SSD designed for object storage and digital streaming applications. The company has produced several high capacity SSDs in the past, but the new SSD-13000M raises the bar to 13 TB of data storage in a 2.5" form factor.
The new flagship model is said to deliver up to 540 MB/s sequential read and 520 MB/s sequential write performance. Fixstars uses a proprietary SSD processor that delivers enterprise reliability and consistent performance. The company didn't release any random performance data, but with a small DRAM buffer for page table mapping, the random read and write workload performance would be low in comparison to smaller capacity products shipping today.
This drive is optimized for sequential data, making it a what I call a NAS- or SAN-optimized SSD. Optimal workloads include object storage, streaming content distribution, CG/VFX production, and video processing.
"Continuing the development of the world's highest capacity SSD product line, we are pleased to take capacity one step further and present the SSD-13000M. The Fixstars SSD series has been highly regarded for their distinct reliability on steady read/write performance that lasts over time. Having met user expectations for higher capacities, Fixstars will continue to innovate and provide unique storage solutions to it's customers in Japan and in the U.S.," said Satoshi Miki, CEO of Fixstars Corporation.
Last year we tested a Fixstar SSD but found that the drive was not suitable for standard desktop performance testing due to the low random performance. The drive is designed for very specific workloads and should be used in conjunction with other identical drives in RAID arrays to serve content over networks. Fixstars has several design wins with previously released SSDs that are used for video production environments in Hollywood studios.
Chris Ramseyer is a Contributing Editor for Tom's Hardware, covering Storage. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook. Follow Tom's Hardware on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
I dont see this being available to just any consumer. Nor would a normal user want one.
However, I'm certain that the price will be quite high.
if you have to ask you can't afford it
In consumer land this would be nice for data/games, a replacement for fat HDD's. Now if SSD's with lower random performance would cost much less than a regular SSD we would have a nice HDD killer.
SSDs have been able to be much denser for a while now, just still more expensive too. A 3.5" SSD with similar technology to this one might be able to reach between 100TB and 200TB, granted the costs could give people heart attacks.
What are you talking about? 13TB of cool, silent, compact, portable, durable storage that can be powered from a USB 3.0 connection.
All kinds of people would use this device is it was affordable. Most "normal" people could back their whole lives up to one of these.
Most "normal" people could store their entire media library on one of these.
This drive, the new Mushkin 4TB SSD's seemingly to be priced at ~ $500 US, everybody is going to be getting onboard with NAND based storage.
What are you talking about? 13TB of cool, silent, compact, portable, durable storage that can be powered from a USB 3.0 connection.
All kinds of people would use this device is it was affordable. Most "normal" people could back their whole lives up to one of these.
Most "normal" people could store their entire media library on one of these.
This drive, the new Mushkin 4TB SSD's seemingly to be priced at ~ $500 US, everybody is going to be getting onboard with NAND based storage.
It has very low random performance, meaning it would not be suitable for normal users:
"the drive was not suitable for standard desktop performance testing due to the low random performance. The drive is designed for very specific workloads and should be used in conjunction with other identical drives in RAID arrays to serve content over networks."
Media streaming easily falls under such a usage, so yes it would be. It all depends on how it is used. Backing things up as scrote suggested is also the type of usage the drive is intended for, a sequential workload.
I have accumulated in my entire computer life (about 15 years) a total of 1TB of data. That is, with a lot of games (pirated, yes, but that's not important), music and personal pictures/videos. If I take out the games (Steam is a nice way to go legal and save the space of non-playing games in my HDD) I'll have a total of 590GB.
I don't know what you people store that is so big. I have Netflix for TV and movies (temporary torrents fill the still-not-on-Netflix-but-I-really-want-to-watch-it gap), and Spotify for music.
Maybe in the near future when all games are GTA V size (50GB+) things will change for me.
A single Blu-Ray movie might use around 25GB or 50GB of space. People who have lots of blu-ray movies and want digital copies of them can easily fill several TB with just movies. That's just one example. People who have lots of very high quality pictures such as those taken by most modern cell phones can fill up a lot of space with those too. Of course, as you know games can take up a lot of space too. People who have played a lot of large games can easily fill over a TB with games over several years. GTA V was far from the first game around 50GB and there are many, many more at least over 20GB.
Then we have people who do editing and other things that can take up lots of space just for the programs, let alone the projects. Then there's people who mess around with virtual machines, game servers, and the list goes on and on.
This isn't a high-performance drive, so using a high-performance interface would be wasteful and using PCIe would make using high numbers of the drives per system for high-density storage difficult if not impossible. SATA3 is well-supported and has enough bandwidth for such a device. SAS 12Gb/s is also an option, but if the drive either isn't fast enough to saturate SAS 12Gb/s or doesn't need to be that fast for the expected workloads, then why bother? SATA3 would allow cheaper controllers to be used because SATA controllers don't work with SAS drives.
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