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WD And Sandisk Join Forces
Western Digital and Sandisk have teamed up to create Western Digital’s first hybrid storage device that uses Sandisk’s iSSD and Western Digital’s Caviar Black hard drive.
Western Digital, which has dabbled in solid state disks (SSDs) for the enterprise market, has stayed away from hybrid drives that use relatively small SSDs to act as cache for hard drives. Now the firm has teamed with Sandisk to create its WD Black Solid State Hybrid drives with 500GB capacity.
Western Digital is pitching its hybrid drives at laptop makers, offering units with 5mm, 7mm and 9.5mm heights. The firm said Sandisk’s iSSD uses 19nm NAND flash and claimed it is the world’s “smallest and most advanced semiconductor manufacturing process”, a claim that Intel might question.
Kevin Conley, SVP and GM of client storage solutions at Sandisk said, “By combining SanDisk’s unparalleled flash memory expertise and technology with the hard drive know-how of Western Digital, WD Black SSHDs [solid state hard drives] offer outstanding hard drive-like capacity, and the slim form factor and the level of performance that you will only get with flash memory solutions.”
Seagate was first to introduce hybrid drives with its Momentus XT range, which offers an impressive performance boost over mechanical hard drives for certain workloads. The problem for Western Digital and Seagate is that hybrid drives are merely a stop-gap rather than a long term strategy, with SSD prices falling rapidly due to competition in the SSD industry as opposed to the hard drive industry, where Seagate, Western Digital and Toshiba have a comfortable ride.
Super Talent Outs New SSDs
Super Talent has announced a new line of SATA III SSDs, the Super Talent SuperNova. Aimed at the business market, SuperNova SSDs will be available in 128 and 256GB capcities.
Although it has not announced any details regarding the new SuperNova lineup in its official press release, Super Talent did note that SuperNova features high transfer speeds and “the most secure encryption” on the planet, as well as the proprietary RAISE technology that virtually eliminates unrecoverable read errors.
After some digging around we managed to find that SuperNova is based on Sandforce SF-2200 controller paired up with ONFI Synchronous MLC NAND chips that should provide enterprise level of reliability. The sequential performance is set at 555MB/s read and 525MB/s for write while random 4K performance is at 90K IOPS read and 85K IOPS write, for both 128 and 256GB models.