Micron Sees Very Strong Demand for SSDs

Micron seems to be doing quite well for itself on the SSD market, especially considering that its C300 RealSSD has only recently been introduced. Despite its youth, the storage unit seems to have garnered a very positive response on the part of performance-demanding users, thanks to its very high data-transfer rates, even though it only comes in capacities of 128GB and 256GB, significantly lower than those of hard drives.

The high price of solid state drives and their generally lower storage capacities, compared with those of HDDs, have not allowed SSDs to become very widespread or popular among users interested in multimedia or video games. However, they are quite beneficial when used as boot drives or in high-performance systems, because they can reach groundbreaking read and write speeds, even on the same SATA 3.0Gbps interface as most mainstream storage units.

Micron's C300 RealSSD, however, takes things even further by implementing the SATA 6.0Gbps, which allows it to reach the rather striking speeds of 355MB/s when reading and of 215MB/s when writing. It is this performance, combined with the cost efficiency and high capacity enabled by the 34nm MLC NAND Flash memory, that has led to the company being surprised by a stronger than expected demand.

“We began shipping our award winning C300 RealSSD beyond our OEM customer base into our distribution channel during the second quarter. Initial demand for SSD product is very strong, and we are currently on allocation for our channel customers. We sold out on our crucial.com and it is the first SSD we have ever offered online,” Micron Vice President of Worldwide Sales Mark Adams said during a conference call with financial analysts.

“Last quarter we began shipping SSDs to some OEM customers, and we opened some of our allocation [to evaluate the demand in] the channel and our online website crucial.com,” he added. “The results were phenomenal. So, we see a constraint on available NAND for that product line.”