Micron to sell PCIe NVME SSDs under Crucial Ballistix brand

Micron has announced its first NVME SSDs with a PCIe interface at Computex. The company also announces that it will sell such SSDs under the ‘Ballistix by Crucial’ brand name. The fast SSDs should appear on the market at the end of this year.

Memory manufacturer Micron releases consumer SSDs with the brand name Crucial, but will use the Ballistix sub-brand for its new NVME SSDs. The company mainly markets products aimed at gamers under that name.

A page has appeared on the Ballistix website showing the TX3 SSD, but information has not yet been released. According to The SSD Review, the TX3 has an SM2260 controller and a prototype achieves a read speed of 2400MB/s and a write speed of 1000MB/s. There will be versions of 250GB, 500GB and 1TB.

Micron has also revealed details of two new series of m2 SSDs that use 3D NAND memory. The Micron 2100 SSD is an NVME model that uses the PCIe interface. It is the company’s first NVME SSD and there will be variants with storage capacity up to 1TB in m2-2280 format. Mass production will start at the end of the summer. This is probably the SSD that the company will sell to consumers as Ballistix TX3.

The manufacturer does provide specifications for the Micron 1100 SSDs. Mass production of these SATA SSDs in m2 form factor will start in July. There will be versions with capacities of 256GB, 512GB, 1TB and 2TB. The 1100 SSDs use a Marvell 88SS1074 controller and are equipped with 3D Nand TLC memory. These are chips with 32 layers of 384Gbit, with which the capacity per chip is 48GB. Micron will also use these chips for the Crucial MX300 series. Details about the successors of the MX200 SSDs already appeared in April, but there is no official release yet.

Micron 1100-sata-ssd (left) and Micron 2100-nvme-ssd (right)