Balancing performance, endurance, capacity and price has always been a tricky space to navigate when looking for the best SSD. Enmotus' FuzeDrive aims to solve this dilemma. Available in 900GB and 1.6TB capacities, FuzeDrives just launched on Indiegogo for preorder and will ship in November.
Enmotus' FuzeDrive combines SLC and QLC flash -- hence the name -- even though the SLC is just QLC coded to behave like SLC. This means the FuzeDrive can dynamically shift data around to suit the user's needs. Data rewritten frequently and requiring fast speeds reside on the SLC section, with the bulk of data storage on the QLC flash. This works because SLC NAND doesn't wear out nearly as quickly as QLC NAND and is much faster in writing operations. Head here for a full technical deep-dive on FuzeDrive.
The drives are M.2 SSDs measuring 80mm long (as standard as it gets), along with an optional heatsink and lighting. They are supported on both AMD and Intel platforms, and you can clone your existing drive over to them if you want to avoid a full system re-installation. Read and write speeds are 3,470 MBps and 3,000 MBps, respectively.
“Enmotus developed a solution that reacts to the way the user actually uses their storage, rather than focus on raw speeds and feeds. We wanted to offer the community a device that performs more smoothly and consistently over it’s life,” said Andy Mills, CEO and co-founder of Enmotus.
“Furthermore, we wanted to offer a new classification system that helps users understand the level of endurance they are buying with any SSD now that we have much lower enduring type of NAND technology entering the market. This will greatly simplify the buying process for end users who are becoming increasingly concerned about the durability of the newer SSDs.”
Price
Pricing is surprisingly reasonable for a product as unique as this, but, then again, it has to be in order to compete with a full-SLC drive (not that they are easy to come by nowadays) or make the concession of using 100% TLC.
The 900GB variant with 24GB of SLC flash costs $159 with the launch discount on Indiegogo, and the 1.6TB variant packing 128 GB of SLC NAND is $259. Only 100 of the 1.6TB drives are available at this price though, so you'll have to be quick if you want one.
You can find the Indiegogo page here.
