Solid State Drives are a good choice in a 4K workflow, including recording, editing and post production, as they offer faster read and write speeds, which will enhance the performance of any video equipment. The Fixstars SSD, with more than twice the capacity of ordinary SSDs and stable sequential access performance, makes the idea of using SSDs even more interesting.

The world’s first 6TB drive is built on cutting edge 15nm MLC Flash Memory which has been packed into a dense 2.5″ form factor.The Fixstars SSD-6000M supports SATA 6Gbps, providing read speeds of up to 540 MB/s, and write speeds of up to 520MB/s for sequential access. As with the Fixstars SSD-3000M, the proprietary SSD controller enables a stable, high I/O performance for sequential access throughout the lifetime of the drive. According to the company, “this characteristic has proven to be highly effective in numerous areas such as video recording, medical imaging, big data analysis, network infrastructure, and industrial applications.”

Satoshi Miki, the CEO of Fixstars Corporation, says that “the unparalleled performance of our previous model’s (the SSD-3000M) sequential I/O helped propel our SSDs and garner lots of attention. Since many of our customers desire even greater capacity, I am excited to offer a new solution and grow the product line with the inclusion of the larger SSD-6000M.”

Although prices are – still – substantially different, the capacity of this new SSD makes it able to compete with high-end hard drives in certain market. Many users may still be reluctant to spend so much on such a drive, but data centers may well want to use them. Fixstars also believes that its SSD-6000M will be utilized in cases where stable sequential data access is required, like in multimedia processing.

The form factor of the drive, 2.5”, is one of the important aspects of these SSDs. It means that when prices comes down – and they will – the Fixstars SSD’s can be used in laptops, offering a performance boost many modern applications ask for. To achieve this, Fixstars used flash memory for small-scale mobile devices – normally intended for gigabyte class storage – adapted to hold very large capacities of up to an impressive 6TB. The recording time averaged for a 6TB drive is as follows:

•    4K Uncompressed 60fps : 2 hour
•    4K H.265/HEVC (Broadcast Quality) 60fps : 380 hours
•    Full HD H.264 (Broadcast Quality) 29.97fps ：888 hours

In April this year Fixstars presented their portable solution for video professionals, presented as the world’s highest density external storage solution, totaling 12TB of storage with high I/O speeds in an ultra-small footprint.

The solution presented then combines Fixstars’ SSD-3000M and Akitio’s Thunder2QUAD Mini. Fixstars SSD-3000M is a 2.5 “ 3TB SATA SSD. The Akitio Thunder2QUAD Mini is an external storage enclosure that has two Thunderbolt2 ports with a size of just 3.75”x4.5”x7.5”. This product is designed for video professionals looking for a compact, high capacity enterprise solution. This new unit is capable of storing up to 22 hours 4K video, and it easily fits in a backpack for video pros on the go.

“This new product is a real game changer”, said Richard Wright, VP of Sales & Marketing for Akitio. “12 Terabytes of portable storage is truly unheard of in the current market. You would need to carry around a couple of 8 bay units to get 12 Terabytes of data and due to the size and weight of those units they certainly would not be very portable.”

Another important feature of this solution is its high bandwidth. The host server’s Thunderbolt2 ports can reach speeds of up to 1.38GB per second. “Thunderbolt delivers unparalleled performance, flexibility and simplicity to personal computing”, said Jason Ziller, Intel’s director of Thunderbolt Marketing, “Products like the Akitio Thunder2 Quad Mini helps highlight what Thunderbolt makes possible.”

“This solution is ideal for M&E professionals”, Satoshi Miki, CEO & Co-Founder of Fixstars Corporation (Tokyo), “On most ordinary SSD devices, the peak advertised performance is not consistently attainable and continuous writing will often suffer from fluctuating performance. The unique design of our SSD controller ensures consistent high throughput over the lifespan of the device.”

The Akitio Thunder2 QUAD Mini with Fixstars SSD-3000M is now available, with the 12TB version retailing for $12,999. The price may be the problem for many of those interested…

As for the new  SSD-6000, there is no price available yet, but Fixstars is now accepting orders that will be shipped to customers in the United States in late July.