A new solid state drive (SSD) from Micron Technology promises to be the company’s highest performing drive to date. The M600 SATA SSD, shown here, will boast improved power efficiency, better performance, and increased durability and lifespan. The drive also comes with 256-bit hardware encryption and will be available with capacities ranging from 128 GB to 1 TB.
The new drive is being positioned on the high-end of Micron’s client segment, replacing the M550 as its highest-performing client model, and standing above the M510 and M500. The drive is already in production, and will be available only to original equipment manufacturers, businesses and systems integrators.
Increased Performance, Less Power Draw
Micron is pitching the new drive to mobile computing applications, including ultrabook platforms and tablets, and performance-oriented PC desktops and video capture systems.
“Storage is an important enabler for ultrathin designs in personal portable computing devices,” said Greg Wong, founder and principal analyst at Forward Insights. “Micron’s M600 delivers the power efficiency and performance that helps to enable instant-on performance and responsiveness as well as the all-day battery life demanded by next-generation computing systems.”
The M600 will draw less than 2 milliwatts in sleep mode and average 150mW during active use, which should be a boon to laptop battery life, according to the company. Typical laptop hard drives require exponentially more power when idle (130mW) and 10 times as much power while they spin their platters to access data during active use (1400mW to 2000mW), according to Micron. The drive also comes with adaptive thermal monitoring, dynamically adjusting power consumption based on system temperature, which should prove ideal for ultra-small, thermally constrained systems.
Micron is also highlighting the use of its “dynamic write acceleration” (DWA) technology in the M600. The technology switches the drive’s NAND flash components to behave more like higher-grade flash memory, such as multi-level cell (MLC) or single-level cell (SLC) memory on the fly.
Because the technology is dynamic, rather than static, the drive can switch as much of its NAND memory as necessary to increase performance. Since DWA is transparent, the user sees no change to the drive’s capacity — the drive manages the switch between SLC and MLC in the background.
Longer Lifespan
“The M600 sets a new bar for power, security and efficiency in client SSDs and delivers on our vision to provide the most advanced storage solutions,” said Darren Thomas, vice president of Micron’s storage business. “OEMs expect Micron to deliver leading-edge SSDs that give their products an advantage and a noticeably better user experience. The M600 fulfills that promise.”
Micron is also touting the drive’s enhanced longevity, claiming that the 1 TB model can reach up to 400 TB total bytes written, enough to write 220 GB a day for five years. The company hopes the increased lifespan will alleviate consumer concerns about SSD wear-out.
Micron has said it is not producing a retail version of the drive. The model will be priced at around $450 for OEMs and system integrators, according to reports.
BadChoice:
Posted: 2014-09-16 @ 6:08pm PT
Why no retail? I’ll buy Samsung instead.
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