Micron Technology is set to launch a 256 solid-state drive early next year, while also getting ready to move into mass production with the drive for consumer use in March 2009. The announcement comes after the news that the company is preparing, along with Intel, to start a new manufacturing process, 34 nanometer, with a 32Gb chip fabricated on 300 mm wafers and measuring just 172mm².

Micron's 256GB solid-state drive was revealed just a week after Samsung's announcement that it had started mass producing a 256GB SSD. The Micron RealSSD C200 drive is expected to offer 250MBps read speed and 100MBps write speed. Samsung states that its drive is capable of delivering 220MBps and 200MBps read and write speeds, respectively.

According to a Micron representative, the drive was originally scheduled for release this year, but the company is a little bit behind with the plans. Micron and Intel also announced the mass production of their jointly developed 34nm, 32-gigabit multilevel cell NAND flash memory device. Intel stated on Monday that “32Gb monolithic die will give us the ability to cost-effectively produce over 300GB-capacity SSDs in standard 2.5-inch and 1.8-inch form factors”.

Solid state drive makers are able to develop lower-cost devices at higher capacities courtesy of the multilevel cell technology. However, the new 256GB SSD from Micron will not be manufactured under the 34nm process. Such drives are expected to surface later next year. The news indicates that Micron and Intel are slightly ahead of schedule with the 34nm NAND production. Moreover, it seems that the two, which own a joint NAND flash memory venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), expect their Lehi facility to move to 34nm with more than 50 percent of its capacity before the end of 2008.

“The results from IMFT continue to exceed our expectations,” Randy Wilhelm, vice president and general manager, Intel NAND Solutions Group, said in a statement. Intel is also preparing the launch of a 160GB solid state drive during this quarter. As many of you know, the Santa Clara based chip maker already ships 80GB solid state drives to companies like Hewlett-Packard, which offers them in its EliteBook 2530p ultraportable devices.

Back in October, Intel and Micron announced discontinuing the supply of NAND flash memory from Micron's Boise facility. The reduction would cut IMFT's NAND flash production by approximately 35,000 (200-millimeter) wafers per month, revealed Micron at the time. Nowadays, solid state drives continue to gain more market share as they are considered to be faster than traditional hard disk drives. Currently, PC vendors like Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Toshiba offer laptops which include SSDs ranging in capacity from 64GB to 128GB.