They come packaged in 2.5-inch, mSATA and M.2 form factors

Mar 18, 2014 15:20 GMT  ·  By

With how popular laptops, tablets and nettops are these days, the 2.5-inch SSD form factor is no longer the only one sought after in an SSD. The mSATA and M.2 types are becoming popular as well, so Crucial has chosen to release all three.

Called together the M550 series, they are successors, of sorts, to the existing M500 line.

They use Marvell-made controllers as well as MLC (multi-level cell) NAND Flash memory from Micron.

Because of that combo, the read speed goes as high as 550 MB/s on the highest-capacity units, and the write speed to 500 MB/s.

The mSATA 6.0 Gbps and M.2 models only come in 128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB capacities, but the 2.5-inch SATA 6.0 Gbps series has a 1 TB version too.

All of them possess NWA (native write acceleration), adaptive thermal protection (ATP), RAIN (redundant array of independent NAND), and hardware encryption.

Crucial sells the M550 with 3-year warranties and at prices of $100 / €100 to $530 / €530. The marks are a bit above the ones of the M500 which they will eventually replace. Maybe they will go down over time, since NAND Flash technology has been getting cheaper and the difference is mostly there so that people still have an incentive to buy the M500 until inventories are over.

Crucial M550 SSDs (3 Images)

Crucial M550 2.5-inch
Crucial M550 mSATACrucial M550 M.2
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