SanDisk introduces 4TB SSD (8TB to follow next year)

SanDisk recently introduced the Optimus Max SSD with a capacity of 4TB. This SAS 6Gbps disk is designed for enterprise applications and the company believes SSDs will get considerably larger capacities in the coming years. The plan is to roll out a 6TB and 8TB model next year, while a 16TB version is possibly slated for 2016.

At present SSDs are still considerably more expensive than HDDs but this is expected to change in the future. In fact, the newly announced generation of 10k and 15k HDDs may be the last of their kind as mission-critical HDDs and SSDs are expected to hit price parity by 2017.

Solid-state drives are going to continue being considerably more expensive than hard disk drives in 2015 – 2016 timeframe. However, if a company needs to store a large amount of mission-critical data within a limited amount of space in a datacenter and do it more efficiently from power consumption standpoint, then it may get 8TB or 16TB SSDs instead of large-amount of mission-critical HDDs.

In fact, SanDisk hopes that starting from 2017 enterprise-class SSDs and HDDs for mission-critical applications is going to cost about the same amount of money per gigabyte; hence, solid-state storage will be much more competitive than 10K or 15K hard drives.

Source: X-bit Labs