The drive, called the SSD-13000M, will ship in late February. But it isn’t available in stores: you can only find it on Fixstar’s website. Even there, you won’t find a price listed: just a button you can click to contact the company and ask for a quote. The target audience here is enterprise users, but anyone serious about a purchase can get in touch if they want.
A Fixstars release says the drive will have “read speeds of up to 540 MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 520 MB/s,” which is similar to most solid state drives on the market right now.
Without a listed price, where is the $13,000 figure coming from? PC world is reporting that Shien Zhu, a spokesperson for the company, gave a $1 per gigabyte estimate for the drive, saying the price won’t adjust much from that. One dollar per gigabyte is pretty expensive for a solid state, and when multiplied by the massive volume the result is a drive potentially worth more than your car.
Cutting edge tech is rarely cheap, and if you want the biggest SSD you have to be willing to pay for it. And this drive certainly qualifies as the biggest: the highest-capacity SSDs generally available on the market right now size in at 6TB (Fixstars’ own 6TB drive is pictured above), so the SSD-13000M offers twice as much storage as its closest competitors.
The target audience here is companies that work with video: both in creation and streaming. That is the market where high storage capacity and speed are both essential. And in some cases, a $13,000 drive might actually make sense.
For the rest of us, this is just a sign of what we have to look forward to when the tech inside these drives becomes more mainstream. We’re excited.
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