Micron announces the M600 solid-state drive line

The memory and SSD maker Micron has announced the new M600 line of client-class solid-state drives that have been designed to provide new standards for low power consumption and high performance. According to Micron, the new drive line is a perfect solution for notebooks, tablets, ultrabooks and other similar devices including high-performance PCs and video surveillance 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 line is based on Micron’s most advanced 16 nm process technology and comes with numerous features such as RAIN on-board fail-over protection, client-class power-loss protection for data at rest, and adaptive thermal monitoring, which dynamically adjusts power consumption based on system temperature-ideal for ultra-small, thermally constrained systems. The M600 line is also equipped with strong encryption that is designed to meet strict government standards-ensuring valuable mobile data is secure even in the event of theft or loss. The M600’s AES-256-bit hardware encryption engine actively encrypts data without performance degradation and complies with the TCG Opal 2.0 standards and the Microsoft eDrive protocol, making it easy to enable using management tools or within Windows 8.

The nice features of the M600 do not end here – the SSD line offers unmatched power efficiency. The drives need less than 2 milliwatts (mW) of power in sleep mode and just 150 mW average during active use. The power efficiency does not hinder performance as it usually happens with mechanical hard drives – the M600 offers random reads of up to 100 000 IOPS and 560 MB/sec of sequential read speed for all capacities. The M600 also excels in write performance due to Micron’s innovative dynamic write acceleration. This technology switches NAND cells to behave more like higher-grade Flash (from MLC to SLC) on-the-fly, creating a cache that is sized according to drive demands-instead of sacrificing user capacity for a permanent cache. The end result reduces power use and improves write performance as much as 2.8 times over non-cached systems, ensuring that even the lower-capacity M600 SSDs deliver excellent write speeds. The drives are also very reliable – you can write 220 GB every day for five years with no problems and this fact should stop you from worrying about SSD endurance.

Speaking of capacity we should say that the M600 line is available in capacities that range from 128 GB to 1 TB. In addition to that the M600 is available in the common 2.5-inch, 7 mm form factor with 128 GB-1 TB capacities and in the mSATA format where you can have capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB, a fact that is also true for the M.2 version of the drive too. The small-sized M.2 module is offered in both 80 mm and 60 mm versions (2280 and 2260) to provide versatile options for ultra-slim tablet systems too.

The new Micron M600 line is available now via Micron dealers. There’s no word on pricing, though.

Source: Micron