Micron and Crucial Introduce Next-Generation SSD

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Micron Technology, Inc. today announced a new personal storage class, solid state drive (SSD), continuing a legacy of developing foundational memory technology into reliable, high-performance storage solutions. The M550 SSD is designed to meet the increasingly demanding needs of high-performance computing, ultrathin, and media/video applications. It is available today to consumers, businesses and system builders under the Crucial® brand and to OEM customers under the Micron® brand.

The M550 SSD offers 20 times higher performance1 than a traditional hard drive, while consuming significantly less power. It enables quick boot-up, speedy file and program access, near instant wake from sleep, as well as ultra-efficient power management for increased battery life. In fact, the M550 draws as little as 0.15 watts during normal operation. The M550 design tightly integrates Micron NAND and firmware to deliver up to 95,000 input/output operations per second (IOPS). The drive’s sequential speeds reach up to 550 MB/s for reads and 500 MB/s writes, which maxes out the capabilities of the SATA 6 Gb/s interface.
 
Not a bad jump in overall performance going from the M500 and M550, especially for the smaller capacity models. Pretty good showing on lower power consumption figures, as well.

If priced aggressively competitive, then these could become another "go-to" SSD, ala M4. SSD competition has been heating up in the past couple months with strong price : performance : capacity, so as long as Crucial maintains an edge in at least 2 out of the 3, they will sell these like hotcakes on a cold Sunday morning.
 
*Kills post*

Ugh kill me, I was reading that the 550's used TLC nand and not double layer MLC nand

*kills self* Now I feel like an asshole

The upside is I'm still write about the 550 series have stopped using drive compression to bump up read/write speeds
 
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Neither of those points have anything to do with reality. They are totally false and mistaken.
 
ShamisOMally said:
The upside is you can buy Samsung 840 Pro's, which have essentially become this generations of the Crucial M4 for top end durability at a reasonable price. It won't win any speed awards, but the number one concern about SSD's is reliability, speed should play a part, but not to such a degree you sacrifice an incredible amount of drive life for it
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I hope you meant 840 Evo. Because the 840 Pro is certainly not reasonably priced and they definitely would win speed awards, if there were any. :)
 
Tell me where I'm wrong.
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Crucial drives are NOT TLC.

The TLC they use in these new NAND has terrible durability
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That is also very wrong. I mean expected lifetimes of 10+ years on EVOs I would not consider as terrible durability.

You want to see what compression does to kill a drives performance? Look no further than the M500, which uses MLC and active drive compression, that's much faster MLC 20nm Nand SSD, and it performs SLOWER than the 550. Why? Cause they turned off drive compression.
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Compression is only on sandforce based drives.
 
*redacted*

This is why you triple check your sources kids ;D *kills self*
 
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@Jorona

I saw =D. I can't find where I read that they 550's used TLC anymore either, kinda makes me look like an asshat.

That said, the 550 series still is not using drive compression, which speeds up SSD read/write times considerably. Now they're more just like platter hard drives when not doing compression routines.
 
ShamisOMally said:
@Jorona

I saw =D. I can't find where I read that they 550's used TLC anymore either, kinda makes me look like an asshat.

That said, the 550 series still is not using drive compression, which speeds up SSD read/write times considerably. Now they're more just like platter hard drives when not doing compression routines.
Click to expand...

Even without it, they perform really well, far better then any spinner could achieve.
 
Jorona said:
Even without it, they perform really well, far better then any spinner could achieve.
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I dunno, personally I find it a cheap way of inflating SSD performance numbers, while reducing drive cost, cause you don't need to stick in a 256mb DDR chip for a 512GB SSD to act as an area for data compression/expansion or buffering

I know I know, maxwell doesn't use drive compression which is why it reads/writes so fast, but I still find it lazy/sleezy way to inflate SSD numbers by taking out the DDR3 buffer, I'd personally want to find out about drive reliability and such, or real world testing as the buffer is there for a reason, unless the marvel controller itself has like 64MB of ram on it itself to do buffering

From what I understand what they did with the M550 is they doubled the amount of nand chips on it to increase parallel reading, and data is not stored on one nand chip say if it was 2GB, its spread across every chip in the array

Would have been interesting to see how fast this read/write with a DDR3 buffer though
 
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drescherjm said:
I mean expected lifetimes of 10+ years on EVOs I would not consider as terrible durability.
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I installed a 250GB Samsung EVO SSD as my system drive on my home system a couple months ago.
Still have a couple 1TB HDs for my video editing, so my actual usage on the EVO is closer to a typical user.

Based on the gigabytes written to my EVO so far, the projected life span for me is over 50 years, so I'd consider the EVO's life time to be more than enough for most home users.
 
I'm guessing this is why the M500 has been so cheap everywhere. Just picked up a couple for some RAID 0 speedyness.
 
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