Crucial has announced its latest Solid State Disk (SSD) series, the M500 during CES in Las Vegas. The successor of the popular M4 drives should hit the market in the first quarter of this year in three form factors. The M500 should not only become available as the usual 2.5" drive but also in a mSATA and M2 form factor. The latter is a form factor specifically made for Ultrabooks.
For both the mSATA and M2 drive the maximum capacity will be 480 GB, for the 2.5" drive the maximum capacity will be the double, 960 GB.
The drives contain 20 nm MLC NAND flash memory manufactured by IMFT the joint venture between Intel and Crucial's parent company Micron. Crucial claims to use its own firmware but doesn't specify the controller used, however pictures of the drive reveal a Marvell 88SS9178 controller.
The specified performance of the drive depends on its capacity, read speed is 500 MB/s for all capacities and the write speed ranges from 130 MB/s to 400 MB/s. The M500 SSDs should become available later this quarter, unfortunately Crucial didn't disclose prices of the drives yet.
