Micron today announced their M600 SATA SSDs featuring the company's 16nm NAND flash. The drives are available in capacities of 128GB, 256GB and 512GB for the mSATA and M.2 versions . The M600 is also available in a 2.5-inch, 7mm form factor, which is available in capacities from 128GB to 1TB.
Micron claims the M600 offers class-leading SSD power efficiency. The company specifies the M600 to draws less than 2 milliwatts (mW)i in sleep mode and an average of 150 mW during active use. Despite its low power use, the M600 also performs well. Micron specifies random reads up to 100,000 IOPS and 560 MB/s sequential read speeds for all capacities.
For writes Micron has equipped the drive with a technology called "Dynamic Write Acceleration". This technology switches NAND cells to behave more like higher-grade Flash (from MLC to SLC) on-the-fly, creating a cache that is sized according to drive demands, instead of sacrificing user capacity for a permanent cache.
The end result reduces power use and Micron claims it improves write performance as much as 2.8 times over non-cached systems, ensuring that even the lower-capacity M600 SSDs deliver improved write speeds.
Besides faster write speeds and lower energy consumption the technology should also help the M600 to achieve greater longevity. Micron warrants the 1TB M600 to reach up to 400TB total bytes written (TBW), which is five times more than many other SSDs. According to Micron, it's enough endurance to write 220GB a day, every day, for five years.
It is offered in 128 ($80), 256 ($140) and 512GB ($260)mSATA and M.2 module configurations. The gumstick-sized M.2 module is offered in both 80mm and 60mm versions (2280 and 2260) to provide more options for ultra-slim tablet systems. The M600 is also available in a 2.5-inch, 7mm form factor, which is available in capacities from 128GB to 1TB ($450).
