Micron Announces M600 Client SSD Family To Include Notebook, M.2 and mSATA Form Factors

Micron Technology, Inc., a global leader in storage technology, is announcing their next generation SSD, the M600. The M600 is a client-class SSD that sets the bar for high performance, high power efficiency, and robust endurance. The M600 comes in multiple form factors to cover not only the mobile market, but the performance oriented PC desktop and video capture systems market as well.

“Storage is an important enabler for ultrathin designs in personal portable computing devices,” said Greg Wong, founder and principal analyst at Forward Insights. “Micron’s M600 delivers the power efficiency and performance that enables instant-on performance and responsiveness as well as the all-day battery life demanded by next-generation computing systems.”

The M600 utilizes Micron’s smallest 128Gbit 16nm NAND flash technology to allow for a broad range of capacities. Micron is offering capacities ranging from 128GB to 1TB for 2.5″ x 7mm form factor, while the mSATA and M.2 form factors range from 128GB to 512GB. They offer client-class power-loss protection, RAIN onboard fail-over protection, adaptive thermal monitoring, and government-grade self-encrypting technology. The AES-256-bit encryption engine is TCG Opal 2.0 and Microsoft eDrive complaint. Endurance has also been improved, up to 5 times that of typical client oriented drives.  The 1TB M600 is rated for 400TB total bytes written. The 512GB model is rated for 300TB TBW, while the 256GB and 128GB are rated at 200TB and 100TB respectively.

In terms of performance, the M600 offers sequential read speeds of up to 560MB/s and sequential write speeds of up to 510MB/s. Random read speeds and write speeds are rated for up to 100,000 IOPS and 88,000 IOPS respectively. This is write performance over every capacity mainly due to their new dynamic write acceleration feature. This feature is similar to other MLC to SLC write cache acceleration implementations, however, Micron’s allows for dynamic cache size based on drive demands. This in turn increases performance up to 2.8 times over non-cached systems as well as reducing power use.

“The M600 sets a new bar for power, security and efficiency in client SSDs and delivers on our vision to provide the most advanced storage solutions,” said Darren Thomas, vice president of Micron’s storage business. “OEMs expect Micron to deliver leading-edge SSDs that give their products an advantage and a noticeably better user experience. The M600 fulfills that promise.”

The M600 series of SSDs are now in production and sold to OEMs, system builders, and businesses through Micron’s distribution network. Stay tuned for our reviews of them later this month!