Flash moved another step closer toward displacing mechanical storage in the data center this morning after the introduction of a dense new solid-state drive from SanDisk Corp. that can pack up to two terabytes of data on a single tray. It’s geared towards the requirements of hyperscale clouds that place a particular emphasis on hardware density.

As such, the aptly-named CloudSpeed Eco Gen II SSD replaces the 19-nanometer flash geometries included in its predecessor with a new architecture fabricated using 15-nanometer technology that not only improves capacity but performance as well. The drive can serve up to 530MB worth of sequential reads per second and 450MB in writes.

That’s up from 450 and 400, respectively. But as always, the improvements don’t come without some sacrifices, the most notable of which is that random write speed has been cut 13 percent from 15,000 I/Os per second to 13,000. That’s a fairly significant decrease, although a worthwhile tradeoff in the big picture.

Organizations typically buy flash with the intention of making data access, rather than writes, faster, a fact that serves to negate the impact of the reduced write speed. The unique needs of the cloud operators that SanDisk is targeting with its new drive also somewhat diminish the importance of the new version’s reduced endurance compared to the previous-generation, since they operate at a scale at which components are simply replaced in the event of a failure.

The SSD represents not only the company’s latest attempt at trying to reverse its declining earnings but also a new milestone on the accelerating trajectory of flash storage toward surpassing disk in cost-efficiency, a milestone that Wikibon analyst and co-founder says is imminent. But there’s a long way to go until that happens. While SanDisk is squeezing two terabytes into a drive, rival HGST, Inc. is preparing to roll out a helium-powered HDD with five times as much capacity.

Photo by Andy Myers via Flickr