Micron outed the MX300 at an enterprise-focused event last week. This is Crucial's first product to feature IMFT 3D flash technology. Reviewers should have the drives in hand. Amazon listings usually come just hours before a launch, but sometimes the company jumps the gun and lists items a few days early.That appears to be the case with the MX300.
The page doesn't show too many details, but there are more than we knew before. The description sounds exciting without giving too much away.
Increase the speed, durability, and efficiency of your system for years to come with the Crucial MX300 SSD. Boot up in seconds and fly through the most demanding applications with an SSD that fuses the latest 3D NAND flash technology with the proven success of previous MX-series SSDs. Your storage drive isn't just a container, it's the engine that loads and saves everything you do and use. Get more out of your computer by boosting nearly every aspect of performance.
Like many others, we hoped Crucial would bring 3D NAND flash to market in an M.2 form factor backed by NVMe technology. Such a product would allow us to compared Micron's new 3D flash to Samsung's 2nd generation 3D found in the 950 Pro. The picture shows us that we will have to wait for such a comparison, as the MX300 uses SATA 6Gbps.
According to the Amazon listing the MX300 750GB should be available April 8, 2016. The performance rates at 530 MB/s sequential read and 510 MB/s sequential write speeds. Random performance is 92,000 IOPS read and 83,000 IOPS write with Dynamic Write Acceleration (SLC layer cache) supplying the high burst speeds. With DWA, we suspect this drive uses 384Gbit TLC. That assumption is backed by the 750 GB capacity size that can be reached with sixteen 384 Gbit die. Crucial may have used four packages, each with four die or eight packages with two die to reach a raw capacity size of 768 GB. After overprovisioning that leaves roughly 750 GB for end users and 700 GB after formatting.
The Amazon page also stated this drive features hardware encryption but failed to divulge many details. The product package also shows us that the MX300 includes a 3-year warranty and includes Acronis TrueImage HD and a 7mm to 9.5mm adapter. The Crucial MX300 package also states this is a limited edition model. We'll have to wait for the reviews to figure out what the limited edition designation implies.
You can find the Amazon page at this link. The current price states $207.99 with free shipping for Prime subscribers.
