14 DAY TRIAL // As solid state disks go down in price and raise in capacity, such solutions become ever more popular for notebook manufacturers, so Micron has just announced that it has developed a new SSD line that is specially designed for laptop use.
This new drive family is available in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors, ranges from 64GB to 512GB in capacity, and is the first SSD product line to incorporate Micron's 25-nanometer NAND flash technology, according to the company.
Announced at the beginning of last year, this new manufacturing technology was built in collaboration with Intel and allows for the development of higher density NAND memory cells, enabling SSDs to deliver improved storage capacities without having to resort to bigger form factors.
As its predecessor, C400 SSD's support the SATA 6Gb/s interface which enables the drives to reach read speeds up to 415MB/second, 17 percent faster than Micron's previous generation drives.
Like other SSDs, write performance varies according to the number of NAND chips installed, so the highest capacity drive is also the fastest.
In the case of the RealSSD C400, this means that the 512GB drive will be able to achieve up to 260MB/second write speeds, which is more than 20 percent faster than the speediest C300 drive.
"SSDs are bringing excitement back into personal computing," said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron.
"Micron is accelerating this enthusiasm with our new RealSSD portfolio, providing even greater performance and higher capacities than our previous generation SSDs," continued the company's rep.
The very first samples are already shipping, Micron working with netbook manufacturers in order to qualify its new RealSSD drives under the C400 product name, mass production being scheduled for February.
In the consumer space Crucial, a division of Micron, will begin selling the new drives under the Crucial m4 SSD name.
This SSD line is expected to become available worldwide in the first quarter of 2011.