Crucial announces M550 SSDs

Crucial has announced new SSDs. Micron’s consumer brand M550 models feature Micron’s 20nm MLC memory and are available in 128GB, 256GB, 512GB and 1TB variants.

While Crucial focuses on the mainstream market with the M500 SSDs, the M550 models should be used for desktops, ultrabooks and video and media applications. The M550 drives therefore have higher performance than the M500. The advertised sequential read and write speeds are respectively 550MB/s and 500MB/s, although the 128GB model writes at 350MB/s.

The number of iops at random 4kB read and write has also received a significant boost over the M500. For example, the 512GB and 1TB models are at 95K and 85K, while the 480GB and 960GB models of the M500 series are in both cases at 80K. The speed gain has been achieved by using the updated Marvell 88SS9189 controller. In addition, for the 128GB and 256GB SSDs, Crucial uses 64Gb MLC instead of 128Gb chips, which ensures better performance.

The drives also have Crucial’s parity technology RAIN, which is now used more efficiently, so that a smaller part of the nand has to be reserved for data redundancy. Crucial claims that the mttf is 72TB. The drives will be available in 2.5″, M.2, and msata form factors.