Micron Debuts 32GB and 64GB SSDs

November 29, 2007 By Nick Mokey

Micron Debuts 32GB and 64GB SSDs

By using a lightweight plastic housing and specialized SATA II controller, Micron claims their drives are both lighter and faster than the competition.

With companies like SanDisk, Samsung and Lexar already waist-deep in the market for solid-state drives (SSDs), competing manufacturer Micron Technology finally made the plunge on Thursday. Micron’s RealSSD line of drives will come in capacities up to 64GB and in both 1.8-inch and 2.4-inch sizes.

Even in comparison to other SSDs, Micron advertises the speed, reduced power consumption, and low weight of its drives. Performance is enhanced with a native SATA II interface, which allowed Micron to omit the SATA bridge controller normally needed. The drives also consume less than 2 watts when active, and even less in idle and standby modes. Finally, Micron claims using lightweight plastic to house the drive allowed a 50 percent weight reduction over comparable-density drives.

The RealSSD drives will initially appear in both 32GB and 64GB models. While Micron expects to begin mass production in the first quarter of 2008, prices for the upcoming line were not announced.

Showing 3 comments

Doug at 8:07pm 29th November 2007 An SSD will start being attractive to me once I can get 30+ GB in the under-$100 price range.

At this size, it can work well in my setup, as the "system" drive, holding mainly the OS and other related data. My actual personal data is kept on a separate NAS box, mounted over Gbit ethernet.

I use this setup primarily because it frees me from having to worry about my personal data anytime I want to upgrade my system. Also, the NAS uses a RAID setup, increasing the reliability of my data storage, without me having to learn all about RAID.

And I can start thinking about fanless systems, to reduce the noise level in the room (the NAS still has a fan, but it's relatively quiet). An SSD drive fits perfectly for such a goal.
Steven Biars at 11:23am 29th November 2007 You do realize that SSD will eventually run circles around standard hard drives.
Karl Viklund at 8:08am 29th November 2007 Not really impressive at all. I bought a 750 GB HDD not long ago. Before I can get a SSD at 750 GB for about the same prise. I'm not really interested. And SSD doesn't preform much better then a hybrid disk. Essentially a 750 GB disk with a few GB of flash inside of it. The problem with these disks today is that despite their high transfer rate and low power consumption. Flash on the other hand has very poor random read and write performance and the write reliability is very poor. And you can't rewrite the same space as many times as you can on a normal HDD with flash. If you put flash in a normal HDD, a Hybrid drive. You get the benefit of both worlds.