Micron’s Latest RealSSDs Hit 250 MB/s

While companies like OCZ Technology and Samsung have been busy slashing prices on their solid-state drives, Micron has been ingoring the dollar factor and pushing performance to new extremes for business applications. The latest drives in its RealSSD line, the P200 and C200, boost speed, cut power consumption, and increase reliability from the last generation.

The P200, available in capacities between 16GB and 128GB, has been designed for data centers where up-time is crucial and small gains in power consumption can add up. It can read and write at up to 250 MB/s, consumes only 2.5 watts while active, and supposedly requires “almost” zero cooling. Mean time between failures (MTBF), a measure of reliability, reaches two million hours. That figure dwarfs even high-end conventional drives like Western Digital’s new VelociRaptors, which only hit 1.4 MTBF.

The consumer-level C200 drives will be available in both 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch form factors for use in notebooks, with capacities stretching all the way up to 256GB. In exchange for such high storage density, write speed falls to 100 MB/s, a number that’s still impressive by conventional drive measures.

Although Micron says it will be firing up mass production of the drives in the fourth quarter of 2008, prices have not yet been announced.