Micron unveils server-grade SSDs
Published: 05 Aug 2008 13:06 BST
Micron Technology has announced two new lines of solid-state drives, one of which could offer huge performance and power-management benefits in servers, according to the company.
The RealSSD P200 and C200 ranges were unveiled on Monday. The 2.5-inch P200 drives, which range in capacity from 16GB to 128GB, use single-level cell (SLC) NAND technology and are meant for servers. According to the flash-memory manufacturer, they will be 10 times faster at accessing transactional data than traditional enterprise hard disk drives (HDDs). The P200 drives also offer a maximum sequential write speed of 250MB per second.
The company is touting the P200's low power consumption (2.5W in active mode and under 0.3W in idle) and high temperature range (it apparently requires "almost zero cooling") as reasons for its suitability for the datacentre. According to Micron, the drives also offer a mean time between failure (MTBF) rate of around two million hours, compared with the 300,000 to 500,000 MTBF rate of traditional HDDs.
"We are seeing SSD [solid-state drive] interest in a variety of applications where, historically, hard disk drives have reigned," said Dean Klein, Micron's vice president of memory system development, on Monday. "For many, the most logical place is in notebook computers but there is incredible value for SSDs in enterprise server systems."
The C200 range is intended for notebooks. The drives comes in two sizes — the 1.8-inch drives range up to 128GB in size, while the 2.5-inch drives reach 256GB. The C200 drives have a maximum write speed of 100MB per second. The 256GB capacity brings Micron into line with competitors such as Samsung, which announced its 256GB SSD — albeit with a greater write speed of 160MB per second — in May.
Both ranges should go into mass production in the fourth quarter of this year and, according to Micron, the company's Lexar Media subsidiary will start introducing the same RealSSD architecture to consumer products around the same time.
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