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."
Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:4, Informative)
Too bad RAID0 won't give you any.
Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written (Score:3, Informative)
Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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.