Stefan Mileschin

Computex is now running at full power and announcements are coming from everywhere. SanDisk just launched their latest addition to their enterprise SSD portfolio: the Lightning PCIe SSD. The drive is based on SanDisk's own controller; if you've been following the enterprise SSD news closely, you might remember that SanDisk acquired a controller firm called Pliant about a year ago, and the controller is a fruit of that acquisition.

The actual controller is not new, though, as it's the same controller used in SanDisk's Lightning 6Gb SAS SSDs. It's a SAS based controller so SanDisk is using a SAS to PCIe bridge, which unfortunately limits the performance in some degree. SanDisk mentioned that the controller provides a lot more processing power than most of the competing controllers, and the aim is to handle as many I/O functions as possible so that the CPU will be free for application processing. SanDisk wouldn't reveal the specifics of the controller but Greg Goelz, the vice president and general manager of SanDisk's enterprise storage solutions, told me that while most controller have a few processing cores, SanDisk's controller has "plenty more".

SanDisk is a rare SSD company in the sense that they can make everything in the house. Toshiba and SanDisk established a NAND joint venture in 2010, which means SanDisk makes their own NAND now as well. Thus it's not surprising that the Lightning PCIe SSD series is using SanDisk's brand new 24nm SLC NAND.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5902/s...or-enterprises