World's First 4TB SSD Announced By SanDisk

SanDisk recently unveiled its newest Solid State Drive (SSD) called the Optimus Max, an enterprise level storage device that holds the title of the world's first 4TB Storage-as-a-Service (SAS) SSD.

Although SanDisk has not yet disclosed how much these small but powerful storage devices will cost, we expect the price to be in the high range given that they are made using the latest 16-nanometer manufacturing process.

Premium Data Protection and Error Correction Features

The Optimus MAX will come equipped with SanDisk's latest Guardian Technology Platform, which provides three proprietary protective technologies - DataGuard, EverGuard, and FlashGuard.

These features work in unison to provide error detection and correction, data fail recovery, and full data path protection.

SanDisk's SSDs Surpassing HDD Counterparts

According to SanDisk representatives, the new Optimux MAX has a capacity point that exceeds that of the most advanced 15k rpm SAS HDDs, which of course also happen to be much larger than their SSD counterparts.

The company has also stated that the Optimus MAX is one of the fastest SSD drives available, as it can handle up to two to three full drive writes (that's 8-12 terabytes) per 24 hours.

According to John Scaramuzzo, the General Manager/Senior Vice President of SanDisk's Enterprise Storage Solutions department, many data centers and corporate customers have already been wanting to switch from HDDs to NAND flash.

SanDisk even went so far as to say that it believes the Optimus MAX will be a "disruptive force" in the data storage industry, stating that it could act as a catalyst in persuading many data centers and corporations to make the switch from HDD to SSD.

This marks big news for the data storage industry because HDDs have historically been the industry standard in data centers and other mission-critical applications due not only to their durability but also perfromance specs as well.

However, now that SanDisk's newest SSD cards are capable of competing in terms of performance, we could see SSDs replacing HDDs in professional uses during the next couple years.

Expected Release Date and Lightning Gen. II Additions

The Optimus MAX is expected to be made available to the public by the third quarter of 2014. During this timeframe, SanDisk will also be making new additions to its Lightning series of SSD cards.

The Lightning Generation II SSD card will be available in three distinct versions - Lightning Ultra (for high performance users), Lightning Ascend (for intermediate users), and Lightning Eco ( a low-cost entry level solution).

The most impressive of the above drives, the Lightning Ultra, can perform up to 25 full drive writes per day and achieve data transfer speeds of up to 1000 MBps. The drive will be available in sizes ranging from 200GB to 800GB.

On the other hand, the Lightning Eco will only be capable of performing three full drive writes per day but will have larger drive sizes ranging from 1TB to 1.6TB. This drive will be intended for more read-intensive applications like media streaming, cloud computing, and data warehousing.

All of the aforementioned storage devices ship with a 5-year warranty and have an expected mean time of about 2.5 million hours of use.