Micron is announcing two new series of SSD’s: the 5300 series and the 7300. Both of these series are aimed at data center use, and both are built on Micron’s new 96-layer NAND. Where the 7300 series is optimized for high-performance and high throughput workloads, the 5300 series is aimed towards more read-oriented workloads that require high reliability.
Micron 7300 Series NVMe SSDs
As mentioned, the 7300 series SSDs are meant for high-throughput, and are therefore built on NVMe, sporting four PCI-Express 3.0 lanes for access, and they will receive a dual-port NVMe support update in the near future.
The 7300 series will come in four different flavors: U.2 drives and M.2 drives, each coming in PRO and MAX versions. The Pro versions are more oriented towards read-intensive tasks, handling wear and tear of up to one drive write per day, with the MAX series able to handle up to three drive writes per day in endurance. Mean time between failure for these units is rated at two million hours.
Micron 5300 Series SATA SSDs
Despite slowly reducing in the consumer market, Micron is still pushing SATA SSDs hard in the enterprise space, where it claims that lots of system upgrades can be accomplished on infrastructure still running on SATA. The 5300 series drives also feature the 96-layer NAND, and because they’re more built for mass storage and reliability of data, they are rated to a mean time between failure of three million hours.
The 5300 series will exist in a handful of different flavors too. There is a “Boot” series intended for the OS installation which will only come in an M.2 format, and a PRO line that will come in M.2 and 2.5” formats, although the 3.84 TB and 7.68 TB variants of these will only come in a 2.5” format. There is also the 5300 MAX series, which come only in the 2.5” format, but feature significantly higher write endurance than their PRO counterparts.