The storage industry is about to receive a wake-up call equivalent to catching a pale of semi-frozen water to the face. In a game changing press-release, SanDisk just announced the world’s first four tera-byte solid-state drive. The mammoth device raises SSDs into a whole new category of storage capacity, placing it on the same level as the traditionally more robust hard disk drive.
Historically, flash-based SSDs offered between 90GB to 1 TB of storage space, while HDDs range between 500GB to 4TB. A single terabyte SSD is typically costs $400 to $1000, depending on performance, whereas a 4GB HDD costs approximately $350, thus making the upgrade to SSD a poor option for enterprise-level applications.
However, SanDisk’s new Optimus MAX 2.5-inch Serial Attach SCSI SSD will finally be able to replace legacy mission-critical data center SAS HHDs by allowing companies to maintain their current SAS storage infrastructure while simultaneously providing cost-effect performance with less power consumption and heat runoff.
SanDisk may claim that “the Optimus MAX SSD delivers SAS performance and functionality at a breakthrough price point that was previously only available in SATA-based SSDs,” but the cost effectiveness of the new SSD has not been revealed. What we do know is that the Optimus features a read/write speeds of up to 400/400 MB/s and random read/write speeds of up to 75,000/15,000 Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) for the drive via its SAS 6 Gb/s interface.
While the thought of upgrading your home computer rig with a 4TB SSD may sound chorus of cherubs singing together in unison, SanDisk states that drive is being aimed at read-intensive applications with average workloads made up of a read/write ratio of 90/10. Meaning, the drive isn’t directed at the consumer level for the folks who repeatedly write content, delete content, and rewrite new content, instead, the SSD is aimed at business that provide data warehousing, media streaming, web servers, video on demand (VOD), etc
Optimus MAX SSD will be available in the third quarter of 2014; it will debut alongside a revamped version of its entire Optimus product family.
Via SanDisk
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