Micron Unveils Solid State Drives with Unprecedented Performance.

Micron Announced New SSDs with Improved Speed

[08/04/2008 09:35 PM]
by Anton Shilov

Micron Technology, a leading maker of various memory solutions, on Monday unveiled its new solid state drives (SSDs) that feature never-before-seen performance. The new products are aimed at enterprise markets, thus, they are hardly likely to find themselves inside desktops of enthusiasts.

“We are seeing SSD interest in a variety of applications where historically hard disk drives have reigned. For many, the most logical place is in notebook computers, but there is incredible value for SSDs in enterprise server systems,” said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron.

Micron’s RealSSD P200 offerings range in density from 16GBs to 128GBs and are available in a standard 2.5" form factor. The company's RealSSD P200 - which are based on single-level cell (SLC) flash memory - offer unprecedented read and write speeds of up to 250MB/s.

The P200 consumes about 10% the power of a typical data center hard drive, operating at 2.5W in active mode and under at 0.3W in idle. In contrast, data center hard drives typically consume anywhere between 8 to 28W. In addition, SSDs require almost no cooling since they can operate at a temperature range between 0 and 70 degrees Celsius, whereas hard drives can work at up to 55 degrees.

Micron declares 2 million hours mean time between failure (MTBF) for its P200 SSDs, which is substantially better compared to today's SSDs (about 1 million hours for SLC and new-gen MLC SSDs) and is even higher compared to 1.2 million - 1.5 million of advanced high-quality hard disk drives.

Additionally, Micron offers Real SSD C200 family of solid state drives, which is based on multi-level cell (MLC) flash memory, with capacities from 32GB to 256GB. The C200 products provide a read speed of up to 250MB/s and a write speed of up to 100MB/s.

“With our C200 products, we are providing a balanced price to performance solution specifically designed for notebook applications by utilizing MLC NAND technology and highly optimized NAND management algorithms,” Mr. Klein added.

Micron’s RealSSD P200 and C200 drives are sampling now with mass production expected in the fourth quarter of 2008. And Micron’s Lexar Media subsidiary plans to bring the advantages of this latest RealSSD architecture to consumers in the fourth quarter of 2008.