Micron's next-Generation RealSSD Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSDs) have found a happy home in laptop computers in recent times due largely to their size, durability and low power consumption compared to traditional hard drives. Now, with SSD capacities increasing, Micron Technology believe SSDs can also find a new home in enterprise server systems where historically hard disk drives have reigned to provide a dramatic improvement in capacity, power and performance for the applications they serve. To this end they are releasing new SSDs for enterprise computing and notebook applications - the enterprise-class RealSSD P200 and the client-focused RealSSD C200.

Micron’s RealSSD P200 offerings are designed to enable enterprise applications to deliver the necessary bandwidth and performance while reducing the strain on the data center power budget. They range in density from 16 gigabytes (GBs) to 128GBs and are available in a standard 2.5-inch form factor. Using Micron’s high-performance single-level cell (SLC) NAND technology, the P200 provides a 3Gb/s SATA-based sequential read and write speed of up to a maximum of 250 megabytes per second (MB/s). Micron claims that the P200 is more than 10 times faster at accessing transactional data when compared to a typical enterprise HDD and consumes about one-tenth the power of a typical data center hard drive, operating at 2.5 watts in active mode and under at 0.3 watts in idle. The P200 also operates at a temperature range of zero to +70 degrees Celsius and requires almost zero cooling, keeping power consumption low. With reliability being a major consideration for server systems the P200 offers a mean time between failure (MTBF) rate of approximately two million hours compared to 300,000 to 500,000 MTBF for a traditional HDD.

Micron haven’t overlooked the laptop market either with the RealSSD C200 drives designed using Micron’s multi-level cell (MLC) NAND process technology. They will be available in 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch form factors with the 2.5-inch C200 to be offered in densities of up to 256GBs and the 1.8-inch C200 to be available in densities from 32GBs to 128GBs. Using a 3 Gb/s SATA interface, the C200 products provide a read speed of up to 250 MB/s and a write speed of up to 100 MB/s offering improved boot and application load times and lower power consumption for smaller form factor notebook designs such as the XO-2.

Micron's RealSSD P200 and C200 drives are sampling now with mass production expected in the fourth quarter of 2008.