Japanese manufacturer Fixstars is releasing a 6 terabyte 2.5" solid state drive in July. The drive uses 15nm MLC NAND. 1 TB and 3 TB models are also available, but only the pricing for the 1 TB model is known: $820. The drive is not particularly fast; it uses the 6 Gbps SATA 3 interface to achieve 540 and 520 MB/s sustained read and write speeds.
For comparison, the highest capacity 2.5" hard disk drive is currently Toshiba's 3 terabyte MQ03ABB300, which uses four 750 GB platters. The Fixstars SSD is 9.5 mm thick, while the Toshiba HDD is 15 mm thick.
It's about time to bring the HAMR down.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday May 10 2015, @04:18PM
The controllers have gotten better over the years. I expect NAND reliability to outpace HDD reliability, but I haven't seen any definitive proof of that.
V-NAND will make a huge difference. Bigger nodes (30-40nm) in the first V-NAND drives, lots of layers to increase over-provisioning. It buys manufacturers more time to come up with a better cell [phys.org], otherwise they will get replaced by memristors or something else.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 10 2015, @04:38PM
http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead [techreport.com]
This was pretty good. But no comparison to the life of a HD.
I would be a bit leery to put them in my production env (we do 100-200 GB per day and plans for 500 by end of year). But that is not my decision.
However, we have a robust backup system in place.
For my home computers though. As much SSD as I can lay my hands on and whole disk system backups to external spinny drives. My laptop now lasts well over 6 hours on battery with little usage. 2-3 with my normal usage. That is a 3 year old battery to boot. The speed increase is pretty nice too.