SanDisk on Wednesday unveiled the Optimus MAX, a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) solid state drive (SSD) and supposedly the first of its kind to offer a whopping 4TB of capacity. The selling point to enterprise customers is that the Optimus MAX achieves a capacity point that outpaces today's highest-capacity 2.5-inch 10K and 15K RPM SAS mechanical hard drives, thereby making it a trule replacement for legacy mission-critical data center SAS HDDs.

"Customers have been looking for a way to transition their data centers from HDDs to NAND flash, but have been forced to decide between cost and performance, or give up important functionality," said John Scaramuzzo, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Enterprise Storage Solutions at SanDisk. "The Optimus MAX eliminates the need for compromises. We believe that the Optimus MAX will be a disruptive force within the storage industry, catalyzing many organizations to make the switch from their HDD-prominent data center infrastructures to SSDs."

According to SanDisk, the cost advantage that's typically associated with 10K and 15K SAS HDDs is largely negated by their inability to meet today's application demands as real-time access to large volumes of data becomes increasingly important. The Optimus MAX is supposed to be the SSD solution they've been waiting for to replace underperforming HDDs, while also offering significant cost savings in infrastructure expenses (fewer racks, PSUs, HBAs, and the such) and without needing to swtich to SATA, or so the sales pitch goes.

The Optimus MAX -- and the entire Optimus family, as of today -- sport 19nm multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash memory. As for the 4TB Optimus MAX, SanDisk says it can deliver sequential and write performance of up to 400MB/s, and random read and write performance of up to 75,000 IOPS and 15,000 IOPS, respectively. Here's a video with more information (complete with cheesy soundtrack):

The First 4TB Capacity SAS SSD -- Optimus MAX™ SSD