Crucial M500 SSD Promises 960GB For $600

crookedvulture writes "SSD prices are falling as drive makers start using next-generation NAND built on smaller fabrication processes. Micron and Crucial have announced a new M500 drive that's particularly aggressive on that front, promising 960GB for just $600, or about $0.63 per gigabyte. SSDs in the terabyte range currently cost $1,000 and up, so the new model represents substantial savings; you can thank the move to 20-nm MLC NAND for the price reduction. Although the 960GB version will be limited to a 2.5" form factor, there will be mSATA and NGFF-based variants with 120-480GB of storage. The M500 is rated for peak read and write speeds of 500 and 400MB/s, respectively, and it can crunch 80k random 4KB IOps. Crucial covers the drive with a three-year warranty and rates it for 72TB of total bytes written. Expect the M500 to be available this quarter as both a standalone drive and inside pre-built systems."

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[arth1]

What are the maximum write cycles for todays SSDs? I'm sure they are similar.

Typical figures:
SLC: 100,000
MLC: 10,000
TLC: 5,000

You get more storage for the price with MLC and TLC, which is why they're popular. But I'd much rather have a 128 GB SLC drive than a 1 TB MLC drive, for the same price.
What's sad is that it's almost impossible to find SLC drives now, due to consumerism.

Re:SSD replacements?

[h4rr4r]

Too bad RAID0 won't give you any.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[enemabagjones]

I think it's plenty for any desktop - I use an SSD for both applications and data (productivity, web browsing and gaming), and average less than 1GB writes a day. Even if you're downloading a new game from Steam every day, say 10GB of writes a day, that's still 20 years of usage. If you're writing lots of tiny files and the disk is mostly full (pretty much the worst case scenario for SSDs) so the write amplification is, say, 5x, that's still 4 years of usage.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[jtownatpunk.net]

I have a 750 gig Seagate hybrid drive on my gaming computer. Only thing on it is the OS, games, and a few apps. No movies, no music, no "junk drawer". I'm currently using 562 gigs. That's with all but the most recent restore point deleted, and a recent disk cleanup. I don't even have productivity software installed.

So a 960 gig SSD is of interest to me. What would be of more interest is a 2tb or larger hybrid drive with a moderately sized SSD. Something like the 3tb fusion drive Apple has would be excellent. I've been quite happy with the performance of my hybrid drive and I'd rather pay $200 or so for a 2tb hybrid than $600 for a 960gb SSD.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[schlachter]

Crucial wouldn't confirm the write-erase limit of the m4's flash chips, but it does publish endurance specifications for the drive as a whole. According to the company, the m4 can write 72 terabytes of data over its lifetime. Amortize that over a five-year span, and you're looking at 40GB per day.

Just noticed that Crucial made the same claim on their m4 drives...only 72TB seems like a lot more when you're dealing with a 128/256GB drive.