Micron re-furtles its data centre SSD offering

Your customers' cat vids will be safe and dispatchable aboard this

Micron has revved its middle-of-the-road M500DC SSD with smaller cells and boosted security to turn out a cost-optimised SSD which it says will take over more work from spinning disks.

The M510DC is built from 16nm MLC NAND and Micron says it's complementary to the existing M500DC SSD, built with older 20nm technology and using the same 6Gbit/s SATA interface.

The M510DC has a 960GB maximum capacity; the M500DC topped out at 800GB, 160GB less. Also, the newer drive is more secure. It is a self-encrypting drive and the encryption level is TCG Enterprise v1.0 Final Rev 3.0-compliant.

It also has full power-loss protection.

Apart from that, the differences are surprisingly few. The newer drive has slightly lower endurance and its write latency of 3 microseconds is double the M500DC's 1.5 microseconds. We could say the M510DC is optimised a little more strongly for random read operations.

A table shows the main similarities and differences between the two drives.

M510DC and M500DC speeds 'n feeds

The two drives share the same mean time to failure (MTTF) rating of 2 million hours. All-in-all the M510DC is represents a steady evolution of the M500DC's technology, with nothing dramatic.

Micron thinks its new drive is good for read-optimised apps like content delivery, customer web applications and business analytic databases.

The excitement in this product line will come with a 3D NAND implementation, boosting capacity and hopefully lowering the per-GB cost significantly. Maybe also popping performance up more as well.

The M510DC is in production already and being supplied to its OEM and channel partners. ®