PRESS RELEASE
Irvine, CA, February 7, 2017 — Western Digital Corporation today introduced SanDisk® SkyhawkTM NVMe-compatible PCIe solid-state drives (SSDs) via the company’s blog. The new SSDs are optimized to offer customers the ideal balance of fast and consistent performance, cost-effect storage and Quality of Service (QoS) to address large, unstructured data center workloads for cloud environments.
Skyhawk SSDs leverage advanced NAND flash storage, a new high-performance PCIe Gen 3 SSD controller, the company’s proprietary Guardian Technology™ platform and the industry standard NVMe 1.2 protocol to bring enterprise-class reliability, outstanding endurance and exceptional 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 fast and highly flexible PCIe interface, they deliver nearly triple the sequential performance1 of comparable enterprise SATA SSDs and enable IT managers to address the rigorous 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:
o Offers up to 3.84TB of storage capacity in a highly serviceable U.2, 2.5-inch small form factor
o Compliance with industry standard NVMe 1.2 protocol with in-box drivers for all major operating systems
o Optimized for read-intensive and mixed-use workloads (Up to 1,700MiB/s sequential read and 1,200 MiB/s sequential write)2
Skyhawk SSDs are the latest SSDs from the company to utilize the increasingly popular PCIe interface. These new additions to Western Digital’s large portfolio of enterprise storage devices further the company’s commitment to offer its customers a wide choice of solutions to meet their unique enterprise work-load and data center requirements.
Skyhawk SSDs are currently sampling to select OEM customers and will be generally available in Q2 of this calendar year.
For further information on today’s news, visit the company’s blog. Addition details on Skyhawk SSDs and product specifications can also be found in the 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 read/write 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.
