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NAND flash silicon die

Flash storage company Fixstars has decided to shatter all previous flash storage records. The company's new pair of SSD drives clock in at 10TB and 13TB respectively — larger than the largest spinning disks (Seagate only announced 8TB and 10TB difficult drives).

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This is the outset time, to my cognition, that we've seen a flash storage manufacturer beat traditional spinning disks in terms of absolute storage capacity — but that capability comes at a premium. First, as Fixstars own benchmarks illustrate, the company's hardware favors steady performance over maximum speed.

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These drives aren't intended for consumers. Fixstars has previously stated that information technology optimizes its drives for sequential read/write workloads, including object storage, streaming content distribution, CG/VFX production, and video processing. The toll tag on the bulldoze further drives (badump-ching) that indicate habitation — at $nineteen,000 for the 13TB version, this drive isn't coming cheap. The total cost works out to well-nigh $one.46 per GB — far college than the electric current price of a conventional drive.

On the other hand, this is a 2.5-inch SSD with 13TB of data storage. Some premium is to exist expected, given that it's no piddling chore to combine, exam, and validate that much NAND per drive. The Fixstars 13000M uses a specialized disk controller designed by the company and 15nm Toshiba MLC NAND memory. Sequential speed is listed as 580MB/s, sequential write is 540MB/s. Power consumption is 3W at idle and up to half dozen.5W under load.

Finally, while this is technically a ii.5-inch bulldoze, it'southward got a 15mm height on it. Y'all won't be plugging information technology into a laptop anytime soon. Fixstars main focus is in software evolution; the visitor offered the first CUDA-optimized Linux Os way dorsum in 2010. Many of its current products focus on optimizing multi-core software or development environments that simplify programming for heterogeneous architectures.

Despite the recent advent of 3D NAND wink memory, we don't await to meet consumer drives hitting these kinds of capacities in the near time to come. A $19,000 price point is still an achievement in the chiliad scheme of things, but NAND flash prices would need to autumn to between 7-8 cents per GB for this drive to price nether $i,000. 3D NAND isn't expected to drive costs that low, at least not any time in the near future.