Micron has announced its next generation of client-class solid state drives, the M600 SSD series. The new M600 SSDs will, according to the company, set a new bar for low-power, high-performance storage for personal computers. To be available in a couple of different form factors as well as couple of capacities depending on the form-factor, the new Micron M600 SSD series will also offer some new feature as well as better power efficiency.

Micron is quite proud of the power efficiency of its new M600 SSD series. According to Micron, the M600 draws less than 2mW in sleep mode and average at 150mW during active use. Despite the impressive power efficiency, the Micron M600 series still offers great performance, with up to 560MB/s and 510MB/s for maximum sequential read and write performance and up to 100,000 and 88,000 IOPS for maximum 4KB random read and write on the 256GB, 512GB and 1TB models. The 128GB will be somewhat and expectedly slower with 560MB/s and 400MB/s sequential read and write performance and 90,000 and 88,000 IOPS 4K random read and write performance.

As noted, the new Micron M600 series will offer a rather neat new feature called Dynamic Write Acceleration (DWA), which switches cells to single-bit SLC mode in order to improve performance when needed. While the SLC cache is not exactly a novelty since most SSDs on the market already have it, the implementation of the DWA is a bit different. While most SATA SSDs on the market have small static cache, the M600 has a write cache that is much larger, change on the fly, and can basically be the entire drive. Of course, it comes with a drawback since the capacity of SLC storage is 50 percent lower compared to MLC.




The main benefit of the DWA can be seen in burst acceleration of small file write performance, typical to client systems. According to Micron, performance improvements can be see even when the drive is up to 99 percent full, but, of course, more free space you have, the larger the cache is and the higher the performance benefit is.

As noted earlier, the M600 will be available in standard 2.5-inch SATA form-factor, in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB capacities as well as M.2 80mm and 60mm (2280 and 2260) form-factors in 128, 256 and 512GB capacities. The Micron M600 SSD series is backed by a three-year warranty.

Unfortunately, Micron did not shed any light on the actual price or the precise availability date but it did note that the M600 is currently in production and will be sold directly to OEMs, system builders and businesses, so hopefully we will see it in retail/e-tail as well pretty soon.



Source: Micron.com.