Crucial has announced its latest range of SSDs, which it claims are the first to offer ‘terabyte class’ drives for under £450.
The new range of Crucial SSDs spans 120GB to 960GB (through 240GB and 480GB) capacities, with that 960GB drive the so called terabyte-class model. While this may sound like a cheeky claim, it’s worth considering that 1TB hard drives only provide about 930GB once formatted, while an SSD will retains much of its original total capacity.
Crucial is a brand of parent company Micron so the M500 drives will be available under both brands with consumers seeing Crucial on the box while OEMs will be buying Micron.
“For consumers, the Crucial M500 SSD is an easy, cost-effective solution for dramatically increasing system performance. For OEMs, we’re ultrathin ready with the Micron M500 SSD – improved response times, lower power consumption, and trusted reliability – all in a design that’s smaller than ever before,” said Glen Hawk, vice president of Micron’s NAND Solutions Group.
The drives are built using Micron’s latest 20nm multilevel cell (MLC)
NAND flash and are rated at 80,000input/output operations per second
(IOps) with seqential read speed of 500MB/s and write speed of
400MB/s. The drives also feature hardware encryption (TCG Opal 2.0 IEEE 1667).
As well as the standard 2.5in drive, Micron will also be offering up to 480GB drives in the ‘stick of gum’
sized M2 format and slightly larger mSATA form factors as used in many tablet and ultra-slim laptops.
The drives are expected to be available before the end of Q1.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.