Micron is a close partner to Intel and the two have been working hard on perfecting the Solid State Drive technology. Now that Micron announces its next generation of SSDs it does it in grand style. The new RealSSD famiy contains two series, RealSSD P200 for servers and businesses, while RealSSD C200 is for the retail market. The difference between the two is that RealSSD P200 uses Single-Level Cell (SLC) NAND technology while RealSSD C200 uses the much cheaper Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND technology. Something that shows from the specifications, and most likely the price.
RealSSD P200 is the real killer with a sequential read and write speed of a whopping 250MB/s (!), which makes it the fastest SSD yet. It uses the 2.5″ formfactor and will be available in capacities between 16GB to 128GB. Impressive, but most likely also very expensive.
The retail version of RealSSD, dubbed C200, will be available both 1.8″ and 2.5″ models, and thanks to the MLC NAND technology there will be models with up to 256GB capacity, of the 2.5″ format. The smaller 1.8″ devices will have capacities between 32GB and 128GB. Through the 3Gb/s SATA interface Micron has been able to produce some quite nice figures for the C200 series. The write speed is specified to respectable 100MB/s, while the read speed is far above the competition at 250MB/s.
We are really looking forward to seeing more of Micron’s new SSD devices. They are expected to surface in Q4 under the Lexar brand.
