Tuesday Micron Technology announced a new line of notebook-oriented RealSSD solid-state drives that are the first to incorporate the company's 25nm NAND process. This implementation allows for faster notebook SSDs and capacities ranging from 64 GB to 512 GB.
"SSDs are bringing excitement back into personal computing," said Dean Klein, vice president of memory system development at Micron. "Micron is accelerating this enthusiasm with our new RealSSD portfolio, providing even greater performance and higher capacities than our previous generation SSDs."
According to Micron, the new C400 batch will arrive in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch form factors and support the SATA 6Gb/s interface and third-generation flash translation layer (controller NAND management algorithms). They'll also offer read speeds up to 415 MB/s-- more than 17-percent faster than the previous generation (C300)--and write speeds up to 260 MB/s-- and standard SSD features such as low power consumption, lightweight construction, and resistance to shock and vibration.
Micron said that it's currently working with notebook manufacturers to qualify the new RealSSD drives under the C400 model name. Samples of the RealSSD C400 SSDs are already available, however Micron expects to enter mass production sometime in February.
As for the general consumer and businesses, Micron's Crucial division will sell the RealSSD C400 as the Crucial m4 SSD in Q1 2011. The drives will be sold online via Crucial's website and at select global channel partners.
