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.
