WDC: SanDisk Skyhawk NVMe PCIe SSDs

Western Digital Corporation introduced SanDisk Skyhawk NVMe-compatible PCIe SSDs via the company’s blog.

These SSDs are optimized to offer customers the balance of fast and consistent performance, cost-effect storage and QoS to address large, unstructured data center workloads for cloud environments.

Skyhawk SSDs leverage advanced NAND flash storage, a performance PCIe Gen 3 SSD controller, the company’s proprietary Guardian technology platform and the industry standard NVMe 1.2 protocol to bring enterprise reliability, endurance and performance to data centers for data analytics processing (OLAP), databases, financial and e-commerce systems, cloud virtualization, media streaming, video on demand, and more.

By utilizing the PCIe interface, they deliver nearly triple the sequential performance ⁽¹⁾ of comparable enterprise SATA SSDs and enable IT managers to address the workload demands of these environments with fewer devices and a smaller physical hardware footprint compared to systems built with SATA-interface based SSDs.

Additional device highlights include:

• Offers up to 3.84TB of storage capacity in a serviceable U.2, 2.5-inch small form factor

• Compliance with industry standard NVMe 1.2 protocol with in-box drivers for all major OSs

• Optimized for read-intensive and mixed-use workloads (up to 1,700MB/s sequential read and 1,200 MB/s sequential write) ⁽²⁾

Skyhawk SSDs are the latest SSDs from the company to utilize the PCIe interface. These new additions to the firm’s portfolio of enterprise storage devices further the company’s commitment to offer its customers a choice of solutions to meet their enterprise workload and data center requirements.

Click to enlarge

Skyhawk SSDs are currently sampling to select OEM customers and will be available in 2Q17.

Resources:
Blog
Data sheet

^[1] Compared to SanDisk CloudSpeed Gen. II SATA SSDs. Actual sequential read is 2.8X; sequential write is 2.5X (SanDisk CloudSpeed Gen. II SATA SSDs sequential R/W performance is XX and XX respectively).
^[2] Performance will vary by capacity point, or with the changes in useable capacity. Consult product manual for further details. All performance measurements are in full sustained mode and are peak values. Preliminary and subject to change.