SanDisk Unveils 4TB Enterprise SAS SSD

SanDisk (SNDK) has announced two new solid state drives, unveiling the 4 TB Optimus MAX Serial Attached SCSI solid state drive (SSD) and the Lightning Gen. II family of enterprise-class 12Gb/s SSDs. The two announcements extend SanDisk’s Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) portfolio to cover the performance, capacity and endurance needs of enterprise applications.

Optimus MAX

The Optimus MAX is aimed at enterprises that are looking to replace under-performing disk drives while leveraging their current SAS storage infrastructures. The entire Optimus product family is being updated to take advantage of 19nm MLC NAND flash. The company is also renaming the previous Optimus and Optimus Ultra+ SSDs as the Optimus Ascend and Optimus Extreme SSDs, respectively.

“Currently, SSDs are used to accentuate high-capacity HDDs in traditional enterprise, cloud and hyperscale data centers, however, increasing numbers of IT managers are finding that they need accelerated performance,” said Laura DuBois, Program Vice President for IDC's Storage practice. “As SSDs, such as SanDisk’s new Optimus MAX, continue to increase in capacity while achieving greater cost-effectiveness, more enterprises will look to SSDs to replace their legacy HDD infrastructures in order to meet today’s high I/O applications and enterprise workload requirements.”

Lightning Gen II

The new Lightning Gen. II SSD product family for mission-critical and virtualized data center application workloads doubles interface speeds over previously available 6Gb/s SSDs. The drives feature error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, instant secure erase, thermal monitoring and die fail recovery. The SSDs come with a five-year warranty.

The new products offer a range of performance and endurance capabilities, with a range of random read/write performance and sequential read/write speeds. Capacities range from 200 GB to 1.6 TB.

“Business data needs are becoming so performance-intensive that even applications that are already using SSDs need an additional boost,” said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. “The Lightning Gen. II SAS SSDs deliver double the throughput to each slot, empowering organizations to quickly and easily scale their performance infrastructure to meet this growing need.”