It's here, the 4TB FLASH drive: SanDisk rips sheet from the Optimus MAX

SanDisk has announced a new 4TB flash drive, double the capacity of the biggest solid-state drive available today. The 4TB Optimus MAX – which sounds like the big bad brother of an Optimus Prime toy – follows the 2TB Optimus Eco, a technology SanDisk acquired when it bought SMART Storage. The new SSD can take three full drive …

[Alex Gollner]

The capacity is good news, but the read/write speeds aren't up to current Samsung SSDs in recent Apple MacBook Pros and Mac Pros.

On my MacBook the 1TB SSD read/write speeds are 870/940 MB/s. https://twitter.com/Alex4D/statuses/395711308156256256

[Annihilator]

And by comparison, the Samsung SSD in your MacBook isn't up there in either capacity or longevity figures. They're different technologies for different use cases, much in the same way that WD Raptor drives were never very capacious either.

[Annihilator]

"We don't have pricing or availability information for these new Optimus and Lightning SSDs yet"

I would advise tightening your sphincter in advance.

[BlartVersenwaldIII]

> I would advise tightening your sphincter in advance.

The current "2TB" (but more like 1.6TB) drive is currently on sale for about two/two-and-a-half grand sterling, compared to £350 for the 1TB M550.

I'm one of those people waiting out for 2TB+ "consumer" SSDs rather than these rather ludicrous enterprisey drives if only so I can get the last chunk of centripetalised oxides out of my main workstation... here's hoping the next generation of Marvell controllers will enable Crucial to make a ~2TB M550 floggable for under a grand.

Still, nice to see manufacturers making capacity increases via controller and flash advancements rather than the internal-RAID0'd-and-a-hojillion-bridge-chips hacks of yesteryear.

[Anonymous Coward]

@ BlartVersenwaldIII

Nice info there. I was thinking (naively mind) why this is much "news" as adding additional drives to bolster overall capacity is little problem for most. But as you say, if it's via proper controllers it will have real speed and usability improvements... though currently at a massive cost.

Why not just get more of the smaller drives?

[Haku]

I'm wondering how many kidneys you'd need to harvest to build a large NAS with them...

[John Robson]

So close...

Where is my limited rewrite, slow, HUGE CAPACITY flash drive.

[Anonymous Coward]

Rid of Rust.

It was a no-brainer to upgrade my home desktop with a SSD drive, but that was just 60GiB. The 2 TB of spinning rust that I needed to add have their days numbered now. Or maybe not, since I haven't had a rusty 3,5" clapping out and calling it quits on me since a 20GB Seagate.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Rid of Rust.

There writes a man who never bought an IBM DeathStar.

[Anonymous Coward]

Will someone please think of the CHILDREN!!!!