Building up on the success of its M500 series, Crucial has announced its newest M550 series of performance solid state drives which will be available 7mm 2.5-inch SATA, mSATA and M.2 form-factors. According to Crucial, the new M550 series of SSDs will offer higher sequential transfer speeds as well as higher capacities but at near existing price-points.

Based on Marvell-controller paired up with Micron 20nm MLC NAND, the new Crucial M550 series of SSDs will also bring some new features including NWA (Native Write Acceleration), RAIN (Redundant Array of Independent NAND) which is quite similar to SandForce RAISE, as well as the ATP (Adaptive Thermal Protection) and hardware encryption.

The new Marvell 88SS9189 controller behind the Crucial M550 series is quite similar to the 88SS9187 seen on the M500 series and can be considered as an updated version which brings support for LPDDR and DevSleep, both aimed to improve power consumption. As far as the MLC NAND is concerned, Crucial has hit the sweet-spot with 64Gbit per die NAND on 128GB and 256GB drives while it had to stick with 128Gbit MLC NAND for 512GB and 1TB versions.

The specification, or to be precise sequential and random performance numbers naturally differ between capacities but Crucial managed to have sequential read of 550MB/s across all devices while sequential write is set at 500MB/s, except on the 128GB drive where sequential write performance drops down to 350MB/s. The 4KB random read/write performance on the other hand ranges from 90K/75K IOPS on the 128GB, 90K/80K on the 256GB, up to 95K/85K on both 512GB and 1TB versions.

As detailed, the 7mm 2.5-inch SATA model will be available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB version while mSATA and M.2 models will range from 128GB to 512GB. The entire lineup is backed by 3-year warranty and should hit market with the same pricing as the Crucial M500 series.



Source: Crucial.com.