Storage has always been a major limitation of SSDs or solid state drives. However each generation of NAND improvement has contributed to the steady increase of SSD capacities. The question has always been how much storage can you fit inside a 2.5″ drive since that is the conventional form factor for most enterprise drives. SanDisk has a game changing answer in its new 2.5″ 4TB SSD.
The SanDisk Optimus MAX SAS SSds have been designed to take the place of existing 10k and 15k RPM spinning 2.5″ hard disk drives, and it does that very well without compromising on either performance or capacity. The company hasn’t revealed exactly how much this solid state drives costs but it does say that it offers “high performance at consumer cost.”
It isn’t stopping there. SanDisk also has plans to introduce 8TB and 16TB SSD models in the same 2.5″ form factor. Performance numbers released by the company claim that the new SSD is capable of a sequential read/write of up to 400/400 MB/s and random read/write IOPS of 75K/15K.
Despite the possibility that SanDisk Optimus MAX is going to cost a pretty penny, the lower heat generation and power consumption not to mention the great performance will certainly make it worth the initial cost. It would be interesting to see how SanDisk’s competitors, namely Toshiba and Samsung, respond to this.