Western Digital is expanding their SanDisk line with the new Skyhawk-branded SSDs. Skyhawk SSDs are intended for the enterprise market, and come with an NVMe 1.2 PCIe interface with capacities up to 3.84TB. 

The SSDs will come in two versions, the Skyhawk which is a read-intensive drive and the Skyhawk Ultra for mixed-use workloads. The Skyhawks use WD (Sandisk) 15nm NAND flash, a high-performance PCIe Gen 3 SSD controller (unknown), the company’s proprietary Guardian Technology platform, and the industry standard NVMe 1.2 protocol.

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.

• Model: Skyhawk | Skyhawk Ultra
• Capacity: 1.92TB, 3.84TB | 1.6TB, 3.2TB
• NAND: 15nm MLC
• Performance
  • Sequential Read/Write, 128KiB: Up to 1,500/1,170MiB/s | Up to 1,700/1,200MiB/s
  • Random Read/Write 4KiB: Up to 250K/47K IOPS | Up to 250K/83K IOPS
• Interface: PCIe Gen3, x4
• Form factor: U.2, 2.5-inch SFF
• Reliability
  • UBER: 1 un-recoverable error in 10^17 bits read
  • MTBF: 2M
  • Warranty: 5-year

Availability

Currently sampling with select OEM customers, the Skyhawk Series is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2017.

Pricing for the SanDisk Skyhawk SSDs has not been announced just yet.