Western Digital and Sandisk have announced to collaborate on Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHD). In the cooperation Sandisk will be responsible for the NAND Flash memory and Western Digital will be responsible for the hard disk part of the hybrid drives. Sandisk is in a joint venture with Toshiba, called Flash Forward, that is currently producing 19 nm toggle NAND flash memory.
This memory will be used in the WD Black SSHD drives. Recently Western Digital has also announced several consumer SSDs, it's unsure if they will also the Tosbiba/Sandisk NAND or that the cooperation is limited to the SSHDs. SSHD drives combine the fast but expensive NAND flash memory with slower and cheaper traditional magnetic memory.
By combining both it's possible to achieve excellent performance while keeping the price low. The WD Black drives use this technology and are available in capacities of up to 4TB. That size is the amount of traditional magnetic memory, it's unclear how much NAND WD is adding to this drive to be used as cache.
