World's biggest SSD is launched – and it's a monster 13TB drive

Fixstars SSD-13000M

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.

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel - 'I Know What You Did Last Supper' - was published by Hachette UK in 2013).