It’s been a long time coming, but as the price per gigabyte for solid state storage continues to fall, larger and larger capacity drives are becoming viable. Patriot already offers a 1TB model from the Ignite range, priced at $325, according to BetaNews, but this is the first time it’s offered anything quite this large.
There are bigger SSDs out there, but they are usually PCI Express-based and can be crazy expensive. While we don’t have the starting price for this 2TB drive just yet, we’d expect it to be a little north of $500. Look out for more pricing data when we close in on the release date in the fourth quarter of this year.
Related: Samsung’s gigantic 15TB solid state drive proves hard disks have one foot in the grave
What we do know, though, is that when it’s released, this 2TB Patriot drive will perform rather well. It offers sequential read speeds of 560MBps and sequential write speeds of 500MBps. That’s not going to do much to combat the extreme performance offered by M.2 drives and the like, but it’s good to see consistency across read and write speeds.
Although we don’t have any official information on what the input and output operations per second (IOPS) for this drive are, we do know that since it uses the Phison S10 controller, it maxes out at 100,000 IOPs on read and 90,000 IOPs on write.
The big selling point of this drive, though, is its capacity in such a small form factor. It will be interesting to see if this drive is used in future laptop builds to help maximize storage space without impacting the physical footprint of the notebook.
