Micron announced a new SSD that uses its densest process and has an onboard chip that can program the memory to act as high performance SLC or high-capacity MLC flash.
Dubbed the M600 SSD, the drive uses Micron’s new 16 nanometer (nm) lithography with 128Gb NAND density.
Thanks to the greater density, the company could drop the cost per gigabyte to as little as 45 cents. The fact you can program the flash also reduces power use and improves write performance as much as 2.8 times over models without the feature.
Jon Tanguy, Micron’s senior technical marketing engineer said the M600 flash drive draws less than two milliwatts of power in sleep mode and averages 150mW during active use.
It has a sequential read rate of 560 MBps and can write at 510MBps. Its random read rate is up to 100,000 I/Os per second (IOPS) and it can write at 88,000 IOPS.
The SSD is based on an eight-channel Marvell controller that comes with government-grade hardware encryption using the 256-bit AES protocol.
Micron is selling the drive to manufacturers of corporate notebooks and ultra-thin netbooks, workstations and desktop PCs.
It comes in three form factors, a 2.5-in. SSD, an mSATA card and an M.2 memory stick. The mSATA and M.2 form factors come in capacities of 128GB for $80, 256GB for $140 and 512GB for $260. The 2.5-in. SSD comes in all those capacities and an additional 1TB version which will set you back $450.
