14 DAY TRIAL // Just before April 2014 ended, SanDisk became the first IT player to offer a 2.5-inch solid-state drive in a capacity of 4 TB, and now the company wants to make sure that the next record also belongs to it.
Which is to say, SanDisk hopes to follow up on the 4 TB Optimus Max SSD with an Optimus Max (or other brand) featuring 8 TB of space.
In fact, SanDisk hopes to have the 8 TB drive up for order by next year (2015). Maybe before 2014 is over and done with even.
A 6 TB unit will precede the 8 TB one though, so we could see that one coming before the last days of December, and the 8 TB one only in 2015.
Anyway, both of them will use the 2.5-inch form factor, like the Optimus Max, and will be followed by an even greater model, the 16 TB unit, in 2016.
All in all, SanDisk has it all figured out, and might succeed in staying ahead of the curve in the short term. Sadly, the storage units will be expensive, like the Optimus Max 4 TB is, so customers outside the enterprise sector won't be buying it often.
On the flip side, SanDisk hopes that enterprise-class SSDs and HDDs for mission-critical applications will cost the same amount of money per gigabyte by 2017. Promising indeed.