Crucial M500 - A 960GB SSD for under £450!

[Arthur]

It's about time large capacity SSDs became more affordable.

 

Source: Crucial (via The Tech Report)

 

Would you believe it's been nearly two years since we took our first look at Crucial's m4 solid-state drive? That's an eternity in the PC world, and the drive is long overdue for a replacement. As luck would have it, Crucial and parent company Micron have one waiting in the wings. Their new M500 SSD is due to hit shelves this quarter.

 

Micron is one of the biggest producers of flash memory in the industry, so it's no surprise the M500 uses chips produced in-house. The drive's MLC NAND is fabbed on a 20-nm process, just like the flash found in the Intel 335 Series SSD released toward the end of last year. Intel and Micron share a joint flash venture called IM Flash Technologies, so the chips are likely coming from the same production lines.

 

Smaller fabrication processes allow more dies to fit onto each wafer, which can help to lower costs. Crucial seems intent on passing the savings onto consumers, because the 960GB version of the M500 is due to sell for less than $600—under $0.63 per gigabyte. To put that figure into perspective, consider that SSDs around the terabyte mark typically sell for $1,000 and up.

 

The 960GB version of the M500 will be limited to the drive's 2.5" incarnation, which will also be available in 120, 240, and 480GB flavours. Those smaller capacities will be offered in ultrabook-friendly mSATA and NGFF-based M.2 form factors, as well.

 

Mobile systems seem to be the focus for the M500, which features an adaptive thermal throttling mechanism that should prevent overheating in cramped quarters. Crucial claims the drive consumes only 5 mW while sleeping and 150 mW when active, so there shouldn't be too much heat to worry about. Notebook users should also appreciate the fact that the M500 is supposed to wake up from sleep mode in just 0.2 seconds, five times faster than the previous generation.

 

Marvell provided the 88SS9174 controller silicon for the Crucial m4, and the M500 uses a newer version dubbed the 88SS9187. The updated chip has eight NAND channels and supports hardware-accelerated AES encryption. To that, a collection of tiny capacitors has been added in order to protect against data loss from power failures. Based on the capacities listed, it looks like the M500 has more overprovisioning than the m4, which came in 128, 256, and 512GB models. The flash capacity that's been skimmed off the top could be used to improve performance, create a larger pool of spare NAND cells to extend drive life, or store parity data for a RAID-like die redundancy scheme.

 

The M500 is rated to endure 72TB of writes over its lifespan. That's 40GB a day for five years, which seems sufficiently generous. The drive's warranty coverage runs out after three years, though.

 

http://s7.postimage.org/flne75vyz/Crucial_M500.jpg

 

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[nicholab]

That the kind of price you paid for HP 10k 450Gb not so long ago.

[localzuk]

That's not bad at all. I look forward to seeing it on the market!

[Dos_Box]

Sweet! This kind of thing is good for the consumer in that it will start to push prices down a bit more. Although the lower capacity drives don't seem too hot on write performance, but for finally making server side SSD RAID more affordable it is a big step in the right direction.