SanDisk Releases First PCI-E Interface Solid State Drive "Lighting"

SanDisk today announced its first PCI-E interface solid state drive "Lighting" (Lightning), currently only for data centers, server clusters and cloud computing. SanDisk Lightning adopts a full-length half-height expansion card model, PCI-E 2.0 x4 system interface, capacity of 200GB, 400GB two, a system can use up to five at the same time, providing a total capacity of 2TB. The main control solution and flash chip specifications have not been announced, only to say that "advanced SanDisk controller", using parallel processing architecture to manage data protection and I /O functions, can reduce CPU and memory usage.

There are no specific reading and writing indicators for performance, only the average response time is 245 microseconds, the maximum is no more than 30 milliseconds, the read and write latency is at least 50 microseconds, and the average time between failures is 2 million hours. The overall power consumption is only 15W.

SanDisk provides the industry standard drivers for Windows, Linux, VMWare ESX and other operating environments, without additional system configuration or other software installation, and supports direct installation and booting of the operating system. Logical unit number (LNU).

Reliability is also enterprise-class, supporting background patrol read, which can check data blocks at any time to avoid data loss, and does not require battery backup or super capacitors.

SanDisk Lightning PCI-E SSDs are now available in North America, with suggested retail prices of $1,350 and $2,350 for the 200GB and 400GB models, respectively.