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."
72 TB is not a lot of data written (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems like this kind of drive is best suited for read only focused applications. Depending on what you're doing you could write 72TB pretty quickly on a 1TB drive.
SSD replacements? (Score:2, Insightful)
While it's nice to see SSD capacities increasing, the real metric is the cost per gigabyte, which is still nowhere near conventional harddrives. A good number of us have massive multimedia collections; It's still cost-prohibitive to store all of it on SSDs. And at least for the short-term, a primary drive over 200GB isn't really something most users need. A select few, perhaps, but not many. This may be something more useful in the enterprise, but then... looking at the specs, it seems it wouldn't survive very long in a database server.
Re:Still a ways to go (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worth it dude. Trust me. The upgrade to SSD was the most noticeable single component upgrade I've ever done to one of my machines.
Re:That's great, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course SLC is still around, for people like you who fail to realize that a disk with almost 10 times the capacity but 1/10th the per block endurance is just as reliable if the bigger capacity isn't used, thanks to wear leveling, and probably much faster due to parallel access to more chips.