If you know me personally, you’ll know that I absolutely love SSDs. Every PC I own has one, and I can’t stand to use a computer that runs off an HDD anymore. Naturally, when I read about a 6 TERABYTE SSD coming out, it piqued my curiosity.

Official SSD-6000M promotional photo, taken from Fixstars’ press release

A Japanese company by the name of Fixstar has recently announced the world’s first 6TB SATA-based SSD. Although 2.5″ SSDs in such a capacity range already exist, they’re SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) based which limits them primarily to server/datacenter usage. According to Fixstars’ press release, their SSD-6000M supports sequential read speeds of 540 MB/s, and sequential write speeds of 520 MB/s, which is on par with most modern SATA III (6 Gbps) SSDs on the market today.

Concerns

However, after reading a bit online, I’m beginning to have some concerns about the drive’s real-world performance. One thing that is rather worrying is that the company has only mentioned sequential I/O speeds and has said nothing on random I/O or read/write latency; although SSDs do have much better sequential speeds than their mechanical spinning counterparts, they really shine when it comes to random I/O (which makes up much of a computer’s typical day-to-day usage). In the early, early days of SSDs, manufacturers cared only about sequential I/O and it resulted in some SSDs that were absolutely terrible when it came to random I/O (fun fact: I once had an early SSD, the Patriot PS-100, and its performance was so bad that it actually turned me off of SSDs for a few years, so I know how bad such unoptimized SSDs can perform).

Construction

The SSD appears to be made up of 52 eMMC (embedded MultiMediaCard) chips in a sort of RAID 0 configuration and an FPGA (field-programmable gate array) as the main controller. In layman’s terms, this SSD is literally made up of a bunch of SD cards “strapped” together with a chip so that it appears as one single drive. In that sense, one can make a similar solution using a board like this, which parallels multiple microSD cards to act as a single ‘SSD’.

The consumer equivalent of the SSD-6000M: SD cards and a controller chip. You can even get them from Amazon.

Conclusion

I’m wary of how well this SSD is going to take off. It could end up being a tremendous success, but it’ll certainly be out of the reach of the consumer market – either by its potentially poor random I/O performance, or its price (apparently it will cost well over $6000 USD).