SSDs are now as big as hard disks - but they won't be cheap

6TB SSD

These are the biggest SSDs we've seen so far

SSDs are probably aways going to be more expensive than their rotating drive equivalents, until  you can't buy spinning disk storage any more. It's anybody's guess when that will be.

But the gap between the maximum storage capacities on an individual drive seems to be narrowing, if not eliminated, especially with the announcement this week of a 6TB SSD from the Japanese company Fixtars.

The huge capacity SSD is in the form of a 2.5"  x 9.5mm drive (yes, you did just see both inches and millimetres in the same measurement) and is built on 15 nanometre MLC Flash technology.

You can read more about it here but you will probably have to wait a while to buy one of these because SSDs at this capacity aren't going to be cheap.

Who will buy them? Fixtars themselves provide the answer: Data centres. That's what they predict, anyway.

While these drives may be well out of the reach of individual users, for larger organisations for whom time is literally money saved (or earned), there may well be a  business case for using these. If the sole thing that's stopping you from making a bigger profit is the speed of your storage, then you can probably justify using these.

So it's conceivable that post production facilities could start using these if there is a business case that outweighs the initial cost.

Meanwhile, as we've seen recently in our coverage about how to build an SSD-based workstation, there really is no performance - or really price-based justification for not using SSDs in a workstation these days.