Foremay Breaks the 2TB SSD Barrier, Your Bank Account

by Andy Patrizio

The primary appeal of solid-state drives (SSDs) is their speed, offering much faster boot, swap and app load times than their platter-based counterparts. But for the vast majority of users, an SSD is used to quickly start the PC and load apps. Data storage is still confined to massive, multi-terabyte platter-based hard drives.

But there are some uses for large capacity SSDs, like industrial and military equipment needing all-SSD storage in as tight of a space as possible and with the kinds of protections not found in consumer-grade SSDs.

That's the specialty of Foremay, a maker of commercial-grade SSD drives and controllers, especially for the military, space exploration and industrial equipment. For example, its SC199 family of SSDs are ruggedized for harsh environments and abuse, while the TC166 is for high-speed terminals, designed to endure lots of wear and abuse.

Already Foremay offers a 1TB SSD drive, and now it's doubling down with a planned 2TB drive for those markets. They will come in a standard 2.5-inch form factor using SATA III drive interfaces

Dennis Eodice, director of sales and marketing for the firm, says the target audience is the military, industrial, and enterprises. The drives come with encryption, a special coating material placed over drive to reduce humidity, and secure erase.

"More than anything else it meets their requirements for temperature and vibration," he said. "When you look at some of the applications where they are used, obviously, if you can use a single drive with two terabytes of capacity, it fits a lot easier into a tight space than four or eight smaller capacity drives."

So while your desktop can get by with a 120GB boot SSD and a 1TB storage drive, other applications need all that pure SSD storage capacity, said Michael Yang, senior principal analyst for memory and storage at iSuppli. "In some applications, server space is very limited and thereby stuffing 2TB on a SSD is needed. This reduces the need to expand and purchase additional hardware," he said.

Eodice did not have a release date for the drives or a proposed price.