Crucial M500 SSD Promises 960GB For $600 144
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."
Still a ways to go (Score:4, Interesting)
That's about 6x the cost of a hard drive, in terms of dollars per GB. If it was 2x or maybe even 4x I'd replace the RAID0 array in my gaming machine with one of these.
Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written (Score:5, Interesting)
These drives typically are used for the OS and whatever apps you want the fastest performance. Fast boot times, quick load times, quick action-times within the application, etc.
But even with 500GB, some people have so many apps and games that 500 is pushing it... so they have to decide which application do they want fast performance and which can they just throw on their large HDD drive.
Some people I know don't want one because they can't fit their 3TB movie collection on them. That's not what they're really for at the moment since the sizes aren't that high. And besides, the average person doesn't really need the performance of a SSD just to watch a movie. To edit/scratch/whatever perhaps, but not to watch movies or listen to mp3s. A slower HDD is fine for that.
Re:Reliability should be the focus...Firmware? (Score:2, Interesting)
Firmware Updates?
My Crucial SSD went poof, but it turned out Crucial said it could be reset (with my Windows PC only).
I hadn't kept the Firmware updated (& didn't know I needed to do so and was not warned about that). Then I read Crucial's note on how to update the firmware.
I simply couldn't understand all the crap I would have to go through. Either there is a one click firmware update or it is a royal pain to update and I won't buy.