SanDisk Plans 6TB and 8TB Enterprise SSDs for 2016

While consumers have just been treated to some of the largest SSDs they’ve been able to buy yet in the Samsung 2TB 850 EVO/Pro, the enterprise segment is already looking beyond that. SanDisk is reportedly planning to launch their data center focused 6TB and 8TB SSDs sometime in 2016. These drives will likely be part of the Optimus Max series targetting 12Gb/s SAS connectors in a 2.5″ form factor. These drives will replace the 4TB models that have just recently launched.

At 6-8TB, SSDs will be closer than ever to matching their spinning disk cousins. HDDs currently top out at around 8–10TB, a bit over double what most SSDs top out at. While hard drives aren’t likely to stay still, capacity gains have been hard to come by, so 12TB may be where HDDS end up in 2016. An 8TB SDD would finally be able to reach more than 50% capacity of the top hard drives. Given that SSDs are already so much faster than hard drives, it makes sense to target capacity next.

It is important to note that 8TB SSDs are not exactly new. Other firms have demoed high capacity SSDs before, but this marks the first time a company with NAND fabs has reached this point. If SanDisk feels that NAND has reached a state where 8TB SSDs make sense on a large scale, the market and pricing is probably good. Hopefully, consumers will benefit from the advances and maybe some of you can get a 4TB SSD to go with your new Skylake-E/Zen and Pascal/Arctic Islands builds!

Thank you WCCFTech for providing us with this information