Micron Technology, a leading maker of various types of memory, has launched its first lineup of enterprise-class solid-state drives (SSDs) that combine single-level cell (SLC) flash memory with Serial ATA-600 interface. According to Micron, the novelty delivers up to 15 times higher write performance than competing offerings.

Micron RealSSD P300 comes in 50GB, 100GB and 200GB capacities. The most advanced model achieves a read throughput speed of up to 360MB/s and a write throughput speed of up to 275MB/s, interestingly, but the company claims that sustained read/write speeds are 360MB/s and 255MB/s, which means practically the same. The new P300 SSD delivers extraordinarily high steady-state input/output operations per second (IOPS), up to 44 000 reads and 16 000 writes, whereas maximum values for a new drive are 60 000 reads and 45 200 writes.

RealSSD P300 drives  are based on Micron's ONFI 2.1 34nm SLC NAND flash as well as  Micron's proprietary firmware design. According to the company, this enables additional endurance  of the SSD: 3.5PB of data can be written on the 200GB drive, which is equal to writing approximately 1.9TBs per day, every day for five years.

"The RealSSD P300 SSD is the fastest SATA-based drive on the market. The RealSSD P300 is able to do the work of multiple hard drives--outperforming a RAID of 12 hard drives in some cases. The RealSSD P300 SSD once again shows Micron seizing an industry leading position, delivering tremendous performance gains relative to the competition," said Dean Klein, Micron vice president of Memory system development.

It is not completely clear why Micron decided to use Serial ATA-600 interface instead of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Fibre-Channel, which are much more common than SATA-600 in the enterprise space.

Micron's RealSSD P300 drives are currently sampling and will be available later.

Tags: Micron, RealSSD, SSD, SLC, Flash