NAND flash storage maker SanDisk (NasdaqGS: SNDK), putting into quick action its May 16 acquisition of Pliant Technology, on June 20 added six new 2.5-inch solid-state drives to its enterprise-level catalog.
SanDisk, internationally known for its little blue NAND flash memory cards used in digital cameras and phones and for thumb drive-type storage devices, had wanted to move into the enterprise NAND flash business for a long while, and now it is there.
The company expanded its Lightning Enterprise Flash Drive product line with six new 2.5-inch 6Gb SAS (6 gigabits per second Serial Attached SCSI) models.
The new drives include three SLC (single-level cell) flash drives with capacities of 100GB, 200GB and 400GB; and three MLC (multi-level cell) flash drives with capacities of 200GB, 400GB and 800GB, the company said.
SanDisk also said June 20 that Hewlett-Packard has qualified and integrated the new Lightning 6Gb SAS drives into its HP Qualified storage drive offerings.
The new SLC- and MLC-based drives feature a new Single Firmware Binary technology that reduces customer qualification time and speeds time-to-market. These drives feature Write Through Logging (WTL) technology, which delivers high performance at low queue depths to avoid volatility that would otherwise require battery back-up or supercapacitors for protection.
WTL operation is transparent to the host and maintains a predictable performance profile across different workloads, SanDisk said.
SanDisk’s enterprise-class Lightning products are integrated into HP Qualified storage drives and available to customers on HP ProLiant servers.
The six new 6Gb SAS drives extend the Lighting line to 11 devices, SanDisk said. SanDisk Lightning drives are available in 2.5-inch and 3.5-inch standard form factors, with capacities ranging from 100GB to 800GB.