Crucial Displays New Focus in Caching & mSATA Solutions – Storage Visions 2012 Update

We are at Storage Visions 2012 Las Vegas and, if our first meeting with the Micron/Crucial Team is any indication of things to come, 2012 is going to be a great year for SSD technology.

From a great display to caching solutions, their new ultra thin M4 SSD and a mSATA SSD on display that they couldn’t speak about, this was a great stop in the Storage Visions 2012 story.  In fact, if I didn’t know better, I might just think that we may be seeing Micron SATA 3 mSATA SSDs within the new ultrabook fold very soon.

CRUCIAL ADRENALINE (M4) SATA 3 50GB CACHING SSD

Crucials new Adrenaline caching SSD is a Crucial M4 64GB SATA 3 SSD with typical 28% enterprise over provisioning and an as of yet, unannounced software caching solution.  The Adrenaline is intended to be a safe and easy performance upgrade to ones desktop computer, providing the speed of the SSD with the capacity of the hard drive and, in this situation, there is no migration or OS re-installation necessary.  One simply adds the new drive to the system and installs the caching software.  Neither company could speak to their relationship as of yet, however, we think that this might be a great pairing between Crucial and NVELO, NVELO presently enjoying a great deal of success with their Dataplex caching software.

MICRON SATA 3 mSATA SSD DISPLAYED

A very interesting part of the Crucial/Micron display was a new mSATA SSD which is being kept very hush hush but they did see fit to show it off as a bit of a teaser for us all.  It contains the Marvell 9174 SATA 3 processor as well as 128GB of Micron 25nm NAND flash memory.

Coupling this with the new release of Crucials ultra slim 7mm M4 SSD, we could not help but bring up the obvious interest that Crucial/Micron seems to be taking in the need for compact solutions found in the new ultrabook marketplace.  Conversations definitely confirmed such and, although they couldn’t speak of any present negotiations, I wouldn’t be surprised to find a Crucial mSATA SSD capable of blazing SATA 3 speeds in new ultrabook releases sometime this year.

Also very interesting within the display was a timeline showing where we are heading with 20nm NAND flash memory presently sampling to oems.  With 20nm hitting main stream in the very near future, consumers just may find even further capacity coupled with great performance and hopefully at a price point we might all enjoy.

Our thanks to the Crucial/Micron gang for offering the time to demonstrate what a great direction Crucial/Micron seems to be heading this year! Left to right we see Ed Strong, Director of SSD Marketing, Robert Wheadon, Worldwide Product Manager, your truly, Ben Thiel, Senior Product Marketing Manager Client SSD,  Paul Alcorn and Kelly Sasso, Crucial Media Relations, all of Crucial/Micron except myself and Paul of course.