SanDisk Announces Second Generation CloudSpeed Ultra SATA Enterprise SSD
At Flash Memory Summit today SanDisk announced the second generation of their CloudSpeed Ultra enterprise drive. This is the sibling to the gen. 2 CloudSpeed Eco that was announced in June.
As with the Eco gen. 2, the Ultra gen. 2 transitions from 19nm to 15nm MLC and brings a reduced endurance rating but increased performance. The Ultra model continues to be geared for mixed read/write workloads while the Eco is for more read-intensive uses.
| SanDisk Enterprise SATA SSDs | |||
| Drive | Ultra gen. 2 | Eco gen. 2 | Ultra gen. 1 |
| Capacities | 400GB, 800GB, 1600GB | 480GB, 960GB, 1920GB | 100GB, 200GB, 400GB, 800GB |
| NAND | SanDisk 15nm MLC | SanDisk 15nm MLC | SanDisk 19nm MLC |
| Sequential Read | 530 MB/s | 530 MB/s | 450 MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 460 MB/s | 460 MB/s | 400 MB/s |
| 4kB Random Read IOPS | 76k | 76k | 75k |
| 4kB Random Write IOPS | 32k | 14k | 30k |
| Endurance Rating | 1.8 DWPD | 0.6 DWPD | 3 DWPD |
SanDisk is already supplying the CloudSpeed Ultra gen. 2 to several major customers for large-scale deployments and it will be more broadly available later in 2015, where it will be competing against drives like Samsung's SM863 and Intel's DC S3610. Pricing will be under $1/GB, but we don't know by how much. It probably won't be undercut by Intel's DC S3610, but to be competitive it will need to be down near Samsung's $0.66/GB for the SM863.