SanDisk Unveils World's First 4 Terabyte Enterprise SAS SSD

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ:SNDK), a global leader in flash storage solutions, today announced the Optimus MAX Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD), the industry’s first 4TB¹ SAS SSD. The Optimus MAX SSD achieves a capacity point that far outpaces today’s highest-capacity 2.5” 10K and 15K rpm SAS hard-disk drives (HDDs), making it the first true replacement for legacy mission-critical data center SAS HDDs. Most notably, the Optimus MAX SSD delivers SAS performance and functionality at a breakthrough price point that was previously only available in SATA-based SSDs. The Optimus MAX SSD tops the newly refreshed Optimus® SAS SSD family and also joins the company’s newly announced Lightning® Gen. II 12Gb/s SAS SSDs, extending SanDisk’s entire SAS portfolio to cover the performance, capacity and endurance needs of a wide array of enterprise applications.

“Customers have been looking for a way to transition their data centers from HDDs to NAND flash, but have been forced to decide between cost and performance, or give up important functionality,” said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. “The Optimus MAX eliminates the need for compromises. We believe that the Optimus MAX will be a disruptive force within the storage industry, catalyzing many organizations to make the switch from their HDD-prominent data center infrastructures to SSDs.”

Historically companies have relied on 10K and 15K rpm SAS HDDs for mission-critical applications because they provided relatively high performance at a low cost. However, as data volumes increase and real-time access to information becomes more critical, companies are finding that traditional HDDs can’t meet application demands. The Optimus MAX SSD offers an alternative—delivering cost effective, high-density storage with SSD-class performance, allowing enterprises to replace under-performing HDDs while leveraging their current SAS storage infrastructures. With the Optimus MAX SSD, customers experience significant cost savings in infrastructure expenses (i.e., fewer racks, power supplies, HBAs, etc.), resulting in a lower capital acquisition cost, dramatically lower power and footprint requirements, and even greater cost reductions that are realized in TCO.

“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.”

As with all SanDisk Optimus drives, the Optimus MAX SSD includes the company’s proprietary Guardian Technology™ Platform, comprised of FlashGuard™, DataGuard™ and EverGuard™ technologies that work in concert to provide a combination of powerful error correction and detection technology, full data path protection, and data fail recovery from lower cost MLC flash. The Optimus MAX SSD also offers customers the performance, uptime and longevity suitable for read-intensive enterprise workloads.

Along with today’s introduction of the Optimus MAX SSD, SanDisk also announced that it updated its entire Optimus product family to take advantage of 19nm MLC NAND flash in order to increase drive performance, as well as renaming the previous Optimus® and Optimus® Ultra+ SSDs as the Optimus Ascend™ and Optimus Extreme™ SSDs, respectively. Tracking to each drives’ endurance capabilities, the new Optimus SSD product family includes:

• Optimus MAX™ SSD (1-3 full DWPD)²
• Optimus Eco™ SSDs (1-3 full DWPD)²
• Optimus Ascend™ SSDs (10 full DWPD)²
• Optimus Ultra™ SSDs (25 full DWPD)², and
• Optimus Extreme™ SSDs (45 full DWPD)²

With this update, the Optimus SSD product family delivers a single SAS platform that can address a broad range of enterprise application performance, capacity and endurance requirements.

The Optimus MAX SSD and renewed Optimus family of drives will be available with TCG Enterprise Security Subsystem Class compliance to select OEMs and through the channel in Q3-2014. For more information about the Optimus MAX SSD or the rest of the Optimus product family, please visit www.sandisk.com/enterprise. A video about the new Optimus MAX can also be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPrdk0sY1xM&feature=youtu.be and further notes on the potential Optimus MAX brings to data center infrastructure can be read on the SanDisk Enterprise Blog site.

About SanDisk

SanDisk Corporation (NASDAQ: SNDK), a Fortune 500 and S&P 500 company, is a global leader in flash storage solutions. For more than 25 years, SanDisk has expanded the possibilities of storage, providing trusted and innovative products that have transformed the electronics industry. Today, SanDisk’s quality, state-of-the-art solutions are at the heart of many of the world's largest data centers, and embedded in advanced smartphones, tablets and PCs. SanDisk’s consumer products are available at hundreds of thousands of retail stores worldwide. For more information, visit www.sandisk.com.

¹ 1 TB = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. Actual user capacity less.

² Warranty/full Drive Writes Per Day - The lesser of 5 years from the date of manufacture of the product or the date on which the product’s relevant endurance thresholds set forth in the product specifications are reached.

³ Up to stated speed. Based on internal testing; performance may vary depending upon drive capacity, host device, OS and application. 1 megabyte (MB) = 1 million bytes.

© 2014 SanDisk Corporation. All rights reserved. SanDisk is a trademark of SanDisk Corporation, registered in the United States and other countries. Optimus and Lightning are trademarks of SanDisk Enterprise IP LLC, registered in the United States and other countries. Optimus Max, Optimus Eco, Optimus Ascend, Optimus Ultra, Optimus Extreme, Guardian Technology, FlashGuard, DataGuard and EverGuard are trademarks of SanDisk Enterprise IP LLC. Other brand names mentioned herein are for identification purposes only and may be the trademarks of their holder(s).

This news release contains certain forward-looking statements, including expectations for markets, products and customers that are based on our current expectations and involve numerous risks and uncertainties that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate. Risks that may cause these forward-looking statements to be inaccurate include among others: the market demand for our products may grow more slowly than our expectations or our products may not be available in the capacities that we expect or perform as expected, or the other risks detailed from time-to-time in our Securities and Exchange Commission filings and reports, including, but not limited to, our most recent quarterly report on Form 10-Q and our annual report on Form 10-K. We do not intend to update the information contained in this press release.

Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/multimedia/home/20140430005731/en/