SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash memory storage solutions, today expanded its Lightning(R) Enterprise Flash Drive (EFD) family with six new 2.5-inch 6Gb SAS (6 gigabits per second Serial Attached SCSI) models. The Lightning products are part of the new Enterprise Storage Solutions (ESS) division that SanDisk created following its recent acquisition of Pliant Technology.

The new drives include three SLC (single-level cell) flash drives with capacities of 100 gigabytes (GB), 200GB and 400GB; and three MLC (multi-level cell) flash drives with capacities of 200GB, 400GB and 800GB. The new drives extend SanDisk's position as the industry leader in EFD performance, performance predictability and reliability. SanDisk also confirmed today that HP has qualified and integrated the new Lightning 6Gb SAS drives into its HP Qualified storage drive offerings.

Pliant Technology, developer of Enterprise Flash Drives (EFDs), a new class of high-performance, high-reliability storage drives, today announced the availability of its first family of products. Pliant's Lightning EFDs integrate an advanced software architecture and a proprietary ASIC controller design to dramatically improve performance and reliability of storage and IT systems, while significantly reducing cost, space requirements and energy consumption.

Pliant's Lightning EFDs enable enterprise data centers, financial services organizations, high-performance computing (HPC) environments, and digital media applications to 'do more for less,' by providing IT managers and system architects with breakthrough levels of performance, reliability and efficiency. Lightning EFDs deliver the industry's highest sustained performance with the most predictable performance profile across a wide range of read/write workloads, and have been specifically designed for demanding, mission-critical 24x7 applications.