Here comes the world’s first 13TB SSD

There was a time when one of the issues with SSDs was capacity, but that certainly isn't the case anymore – particularly not with the latest offering from Fixstars.
The new Fixstars SSD-13000M is a whopping 13TB 2.5-inch drive, making it the biggest SSD in the world at the time of writing. Fixstars has also launched a 10TB model alongside this one.
Along with the whopping capacity – to give some perspective, if you want to store 13TB on standard DVDs, you'll need around 2,800 discs! – both drives offer read speeds of up to 540MB/s and sequential writes of up to 520MB/s.
Satoshi Miki, CEO of Fixstars, commented: "The Fixstars SSD series has been highly regarded for their distinct reliability on steady read/write performance that lasts over time."
The SSD offers a temperature control system to minimise any risk of heat damage to the drive, and there's also an optional high durability mode which apparently triples the longevity of the drive – although with this on, storage capacity is halved (so you'll only have a mere 6.5TB).
Of course, this drive is priced out of the reach of the average user and is aimed at enterprises and for tasks such as heavy-duty video processing.
How much will it cost? A spokesman for Fixstars told PC World that the drive will run to an estimated (and eye-watering) $13,000 (around £9000, AU$19,000), with shipping expected to kick off by the close of next month over in the US.

If you are a gadget freak and have US$13,000 to burn, this world’s first 13TB solid-state drive could be yours. Japanese SSD company, Fixstars on Wednesday announced the massive 13TB called SSD-13000M, which will ship by the end of February.
For the uninitiated, though widely adopted, SSDs available in markets today have no more than 6TB of storage. Fixstars SSD-13000M will more than double that capacity.
Fixstars announced that a pair of exceptionally voluminous 2.5-inch SSD-13000M at 13TB, and the Fixstars SSD-10000M with 10TB of capacity, can now be pre-ordered. The company expects the shipments for US customers to start in late February.
Previous Fixstars drives managed their capacity feats by employing flash memory chips normally destined for use in small-scale mobile devices. This time with SSD=13000M, Fixstars hasn’t mentioned the tech behind the capacity.
It is estimated that the Fixstars SSD-13000M can be used to record 4.3hrs of 4K uncompressed 60fps video footage, or 823hrs of 4K H.265/HEVC (Broadcast Quality) 60fps video, or 1924hrs of Full HD H.264 (Broadcast Quality) 29.97fps video