SanDisk is coming out with the Optimus MAX is a crazy amount of storage in a flash-based solid state drive: 4 TeraBytes!! All of this in a 2.5″ form factor. They are claiming sequential read/write speeds up to 400/400 MB/s and random read/write speeds of up to 75,000/15,000 IOPS! (Input/Output Operations Per Second)
This drive will be more geared toward data warehousing and online services as it has a read/write ratio of 90/10.
Can you imagine moving your traditional platter-based HDD (hard disk drive) infrastructures over to the superior SSD flash-based drives at crazy speeds, small form factor, along with these large sizes. This could trigger a major shift in the storage industry.
Any info on the price of this beast? And what about PCI-e based SSD drives, they are even faster, why not make a SSD drive with a large capacity like this based on the PCI-e bus. And how reliable are SSD drives for long term data storage? 10-20 years period?
Who are they targeting with this beast? Will we, normal users get a chance to buy something like anytime soon? And yes, I would also like to know the price of this, if it was announced.
I think there is a very niche market for SSD this big in size. If you prefer size – you will go for HDD, if you prefer speed over size, you will go for SSD. That is why people are running SSD for OS and programme and HDD for storage. while this new SSD seems to provide both speed and storage, the lifespan for a typical SSD is fixed as a memory cell can only be written about 750 times, how long can the SSD last if it is for commercial use?
Wow! That’s really fast, I have a 7200RPM HDD in my computer and I though it was fast. But the real question is, how much would that beast cost?
I’m not surprised that storage is becoming this large as it usually doubles every couple years. Also, I see that it can read/write at great speeds but how well does it handle garbage collection of data and does it store it efficiently?
So uhh… Any idea when this baby comes out to the market? If it’s coming out for resale at all? How much is it going to cost if it does? Can you please elaborate on the specifications of this hardware…
That is really quite amazing isn’t it? I was just reading your article about how much technology has changed between 2006 and 2013? This is just another prime example. And I thought I was cool for getting my 1TB external hard drive last year (and for less $ than my 80MB – yes MB not GB – hard drive back in the 90’s). You can now hold in the palm of your hand what used to take up real estate in computer rooms!
I’m failing to understand who needs this type of storage while fitting in the 90/10 read/write ratio. What application would you use this storage for that you would need that type of speed just to read?
Well if you’re a graphic designer or a video editor it will really be useful since it’s got more storage to begin with so you can load up your OS and your applications and at the same time the files you’re working on on the same drive so you don’t have to worry about extra drives.
I believe that speed of this hard drive is nothing to be amazed of. There are many SSDs giving more speed than this. But the storage it freaking gigantic in size. I could use only this SSD and nothing else, if I had enough money 🙁
This is going to be one heck of a price tag though! Goodness, I’m more for the speed, but I wouldn’t see anyone needing this for the cost it’ll probably be. You probably could RAID SSD’s together to get the same performance, or even more. However this device definitely seems like it is the start of consumer grade high capacity flash storage, all we have to do is to wait for the price to die down. This and M.2 are definitely something I’m looking forward to.
The huge amount of storage on this device is unbelievable. It really is a game changer for the hard drive industry. However, I expect more and more media storage companies to begin to release new drives like this. Companies such as Kingston need to compete with Sandisk of course.
Geez, this is like a whole database. This could be a great deal for me, I wouldn’t need another storage device for a long time, and I like that idea a lot!
4 TeraBytes? Solid State Drive? That is insane. Firstly, I own a 256GB SSD and it works perfectly, I can’t even imagine a 4TB hard drive. Secondly, how would a normal user be able to use up 4TB of space?! That is a lot of space and as cool as this is, this won’t be very inviting to a normal user.
I can just imagine the price of that. My 256GB cost me a couple 100 dollars and I don’t think I’ll need a bigger one. The only thing a person really needs to put on a SSD is the operating system and maybe a few programmes that they want to run a few seconds faster.
“how would a normal user be able to use up 4TB of space?!” – it’s like Bill Gates when he said nobody will ever need more than 64KB of RAM, or whatever it was that he said 😛 The time will come, don’t worry. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but there will be a time when you’ll have 4TB on your phone.
Plus, the whole idea (in case you didn’t read) was for this drive to target servers at first. This makes a lot of sense: you always want to be able to serve the most amount of data to the most number of people at once.
This is an incredible amount of space; 1TB will hold about 108 full length movies, but compressed it will hold 1365 movies; if you compress even further (low quality) you can have up to 4000 movies on 1TB.
This means that you are able to at the maximum fit 16,800 full length movies on a 4TB drive (if compressed to the max–lower quality). Incredible indeed!
This is an incredible amount of space; 1TB will hold about 108 full-length movies, but compressed it will hold 1365 movies; if you compress even further (low-quality) you can have up to 4000 movies on 1TB.
This means that you are at the maximum fit 16,800 full-length movies on a 4TB drive (if compressed to the max–lower quality). Incredible indeed!
4TB SSD, that’s insane!
It would be a joy to open up any program using this SSD, you wouldn’t even need a secondary drive, like with smaller SSD’s used for the OS and certain programs.
In reality though, how much are these going to cost, I saw a 1TB SSD for sale at around $1000, I have a feeling it will only be available to the rich and ones who use it for work purposes.
Can’t wait until these kind of ssd will be affordable to the general population. They way it is now I can only guess that it’s gonna cost around $3000 – $4000, way more than an average Joey can afford. But SSDs definitely are the feature of computer storage.
I have a 500GB external hard drive and haven’t even come close to filling it half way so I won’t really need this. It is a really awesome step forward and I am sure it will be very helpful to many people. SanDisk is really a leader in storage peripherals.
Wow! That’s crazy fast and the storage capacity is outrages! I was wondering how much it would costs though, a regular 128GB SSD can cost be a bit expensive let alone a 4TB.
4 Freaking terabytes? My friend owns a videography business and he blows through his external drives. He is going to love this!
It’s been a long way for SSD technology, hasn’t it? I remember we were at awe when seeing the 1GB mark surpassed in the 90s, now 4TB. It’s almost unbelievable when you put it in perspective.
Now, the predictions of media and other files taking up more and more space has always been spot-on. I don’t see a reason why it isn’t going to be the same this time. I recall calling a 4MB download “big” when doing dial-up; 10MB was huge. When dealing with these new scales 10 megabytes look like the former 1Kb.
Very interesting times for our field. I can’t wait until the prices drop to see these babies in consumer desktops everywhere. Heck, people is having a hard time filing-up 500GB drives today; it might take a while for the average computer user to really see a need to upgrade to this size, but the time will come. It always does.
Haha, I do not see myself using all that space; but any advancement is a good one. SSD are always the go to hardware and are more predominantly sought after when buying new PC’s.
That’s great. An SSD really matters a lot to PC gamers. I am a PC gamer myself and I own an overflowing 1TB HDD which is slow and is bottlenecking my Windows Experience Index score. Modern day PC games are very huge; the recently released Wolfenstein: The New Order was a 41GB download through Steam. Flagship games are averaging around 14-16GB of space. With an SSD, games speed up considerably as sometimes, like in my case, the reading and writing speed of the storage drive can be a blockade to maximizing your hardware potential. However, I hope the prices of SSD to come down soon. I’ve found that even the ‘rich’ PC gamers have about 320GB of SSD storage.
Can I just start off saying, “Dear Santa”! I wish I had one of these babies purely for the purpose of being able to back up all of my music on it and not having to worry about losing it. Being an audiophile I have collected a large amount of music and would feel much more comfortable housing it on SAS 2.5 SSD rather than leave it to the mercy of my old computer!
Wow. That is just amazingly fast. I can’t believe that they advanced so fast. I can almost remember my old 16MB flashdrive from quite a while ago actually. This is probably going to be really expensive, though.
This probably , as you said are probably targeted towards data warehousing and online services. There’s pretty much no way someone could use up that much of storage, even if he’s a crazy torrent downloader who downloads movies non stop, a terabyte is an insane amount of space. It would be nice to have though, if you fancy the read and write speeds, or maybe you do need that much space, but I can’t see myself getting any of these hard drives anytime soon, it’s really not targeted for the the average individual.
Well if they’re making these large capacity SSD’s now I’m guessing the regular SSD’s will have to drop price soon enough, or not. But still, if they can make 4TB SSD’s now surely the consumer grade and cheaper SSD’s should be on it’s way now. How much would this beast cost is just beyond me, if 120GB can set you back $150 then I’m guessing this will be about a thousand.
This is a very good product as far as I’m reading, I have an 7200 RPM 1TB HDD that I think is fast but this is way under control. Now if you are the average PC user you wont need this. I mean … 4TB??? That’s way to much, not to mention that the price is way to high.
I agree. I can’t even fill up a 500GB hard drive let alone 4TB but I think it’s a good thing that they’re making these SSD’s because it can only mean that the prices for the lower ones will eventually have to go down.
It’s an impressive piece of kit, I can hand you that. But shouldn’t we all be spending more time on money uploading everything to the cloud? Seems a little outdated to have a massive drive sitting on the desk.
Well cloud storage is a different thing. This is hardware, which means you’re computer needs it. It’s for both performance and storage while cloud storage is solely for storage purposes.
SSD’s are not just for storage they’re also for performance. Most people that are trying to make their computers perform faster use SSD’s but these types of drives are expensive and they only come in limited storage space fit only for your OS and some applications that’s why people are going crazy over the 4TB capacity. You can’t really install an OS on the cloud to make it run faster.
Also, this is not a massive drive that’s sitting on your desk. This is a 2.5 inch drive so it’s not that big and it fits inside your laptop or computer so it doesn’t have to sit in your desk not unless you want it to be an external drive, which in that case isn’t actually that massive still.
This is probably wickedly expensive! SSDs with half a gigabyte are already expensive, I cannot imagine how much these drives cost. Though I wonder what companies have done to extend the lifespan of these products. SSDs suffer from a much shorter lifespan due to its use of flash memory. While it does provide insanely faster read/write times because of non-moving parts, the downside is that flash memory wears out much quicker than traditional HDDs. If we can solve this problem, SSDs will be the trend in the next few years.
I like that, and if they could find a way to compact the physical form of these devices, life would be a much better place. It would be so easier to store so much stuff. Instead of having a storehouse full of documents we could simple store the exact amount in a cupboard. Think of all the space that could be saved, space that could be used for many purposes, building shelters or preserving wildlife. Indirectly improving the storing facilities all across the world can benefit humankind, and this is not an exaggeration
Do want do want. I don’t care if this thing costs $10,000 I’m getting one for the next desktop I build because this is an insane piece of hardware.
This is pretty amazing for an SSD. I could just imagine that in a couple of years that this SSD would be as common as a 7200 or 5400 RPM HDD. What’d be even more amazing is having such storage in servers, where these drives won’t fail as much as HDDs, so long as there isn’t any sudden, random power outages where the servers don’t have a UPS. These combined with faster fibre internet connections like Google Fiber would result in insane download and upload speeds.
This must cost a fortune seeing as how a 256Gb SSD with a decent I/O speed already costs a lot, but if there’s one thing current SSD devices currently lack, it’s the storage capacity. I personally think that SSDs are a must for all types of build right now. I put the OS in there and make it my main drive while connecting a secondary 1 or 2 Tb 7200 RPM HDD to store my files in.