An European distributor has put information on the Crucial MX100 series SSDs online, days before they are officially released. Crucial will release drives with capacities of 128GB, 256GB and 512GB. The two largest drives of the X100 SSDs are the first to feature 16 nm MLC NAND from Micron. The 128GB model will contain 20 nm MLC NAND.
Crucial went shopping at Marvell for the SSD controller and got a 88SS9189 chip to which they loaded Crucial's custom firmware. The controller and NAND combined with the SATA-3 interface are responsible for maximum specified speeds of 550MB/s sequential read, 500MB/ s sequential writes, 90,000 IOPS for random reads and 85,000 IOPS for random writes. The smaller capacity models have slightly lower performance specifications than the largest drive of the series.
The X100 SSDs ship in a 7mm high 2.5" form-factor and has the usual technologies like TRIM, TCG Opal 2.0 compliance, ECC and SMART.
The 128GB model sells at €70 ($95), the 256GB at €95 ($129) and the 512GB at €185 ($250), which around $0.50 per GB.
