World’s first 6TB SSD will be available to buy in July

If you want terabytes of storage inside your PC or laptop, then the traditional hard drive is still the obvious choice. 6TB drives are now common, and 8TB and even 10TB drives are set to arrive and go mainstream very soon. They’ll also cost significantly less than even a 1TB SSD. However, that doesn’t mean we aren’t getting larger SSDs, and the world’s first 6TB SSD is set to launch in July.

Japanese manufacturer Fixstars is planning 3 new 2.5-inch SSDscarrying the names 1000M, 3000M, and 6000M. The 1000M and 3000M models will use 19nm flash memory, a 6Gbps interface, and offer 1TB and 3TB of storage respectively.

It’s the 6000M SSD that’s the most interesting, though. It will use 15nm flash memory to offer 6TB of storage while retaining the 2.5-inch drive footprint. Read speeds are expected to be 540MB/s and write speeds of 520MB/s, which is typical of any high-end 6Gbps SATA SSD today.

Pricing has only been announced for the 1TB drive, which is set at $820. We can expect a large premium on the 3TB model, and an even larger premium on the 6TB drive. It’s also unlikely Fixstars has any intention of offering the 6TB drive to consumers. There’s a growing demand for large SSDs in the datacenter, and that’s where Fixstars’ focus will be, at least initially.

As we’ve seen repeatedly, the cost of SSDs is coming down while the sizes on offer increase. 120GB and 250GB SSDs are now affordable. True, they 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.