Crucial M500 SSD Promises 960GB For $600

crookedvulture writes "SSD prices are falling as drive makers start using next-generation NAND built on smaller fabrication processes. Micron and Crucial have announced a new M500 drive that's particularly aggressive on that front, promising 960GB for just $600, or about $0.63 per gigabyte. SSDs in the terabyte range currently cost $1,000 and up, so the new model represents substantial savings; you can thank the move to 20-nm MLC NAND for the price reduction. Although the 960GB version will be limited to a 2.5" form factor, there will be mSATA and NGFF-based variants with 120-480GB of storage. The M500 is rated for peak read and write speeds of 500 and 400MB/s, respectively, and it can crunch 80k random 4KB IOps. Crucial covers the drive with a three-year warranty and rates it for 72TB of total bytes written. Expect the M500 to be available this quarter as both a standalone drive and inside pre-built systems."

Comments

72 TB is not a lot of data written

[schlachter]

Seems like this kind of drive is best suited for read only focused applications. Depending on what you're doing you could write 72TB pretty quickly on a 1TB drive.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[kannibal_klown]

These drives typically are used for the OS and whatever apps you want the fastest performance. Fast boot times, quick load times, quick action-times within the application, etc.

But even with 500GB, some people have so many apps and games that 500 is pushing it... so they have to decide which application do they want fast performance and which can they just throw on their large HDD drive.

Some people I know don't want one because they can't fit their 3TB movie collection on them. That's not what they're really for at the moment since the sizes aren't that high. And besides, the average person doesn't really need the performance of a SSD just to watch a movie. To edit/scratch/whatever perhaps, but not to watch movies or listen to mp3s. A slower HDD is fine for that.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[arth1]

What are the maximum write cycles for todays SSDs? I'm sure they are similar.

Typical figures:
SLC: 100,000
MLC: 10,000
TLC: 5,000

You get more storage for the price with MLC and TLC, which is why they're popular. But I'd much rather have a 128 GB SLC drive than a 1 TB MLC drive, for the same price.
What's sad is that it's almost impossible to find SLC drives now, due to consumerism.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[tattood]

I'm sure 72TB is enough for the life of an averagely used PC, and possibly even a gaming PC.

Yeah, 72TB should be more than enough for anybody.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[enemabagjones]

I think it's plenty for any desktop - I use an SSD for both applications and data (productivity, web browsing and gaming), and average less than 1GB writes a day. Even if you're downloading a new game from Steam every day, say 10GB of writes a day, that's still 20 years of usage. If you're writing lots of tiny files and the disk is mostly full (pretty much the worst case scenario for SSDs) so the write amplification is, say, 5x, that's still 4 years of usage.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[jtownatpunk.net]

I have a 750 gig Seagate hybrid drive on my gaming computer. Only thing on it is the OS, games, and a few apps. No movies, no music, no "junk drawer". I'm currently using 562 gigs. That's with all but the most recent restore point deleted, and a recent disk cleanup. I don't even have productivity software installed.

So a 960 gig SSD is of interest to me. What would be of more interest is a 2tb or larger hybrid drive with a moderately sized SSD. Something like the 3tb fusion drive Apple has would be excellent. I've been quite happy with the performance of my hybrid drive and I'd rather pay $200 or so for a 2tb hybrid than $600 for a 960gb SSD.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[flargleblarg]

And besides, the average person doesn't really need the performance of a SSD just to watch a movie. To edit/scratch/whatever perhaps, but not to watch movies or listen to mp3s. A slower HDD is fine for that.

Um, the average person doesn't need SSD performance just to watch a movie??? I don't think anyone needs SSD speeds to watch a movie. Even uncompressed 1080p24 video at 16:9 aspect ratio is only 149.3 MB/s. And nobody watches a movie as uncompressed video, unless you're in the editing room, in which case you're not watching it anyway but editing and scrubbing and stuff.

A two-hour long 50GB Blu-Ray movie is only 6.9 MB/s. Multiply that by 4x for 3840x2160 (which isn't even available yet) and you're still only talking 27.8 MB/s — which even USB2 can handle easily.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Vreejack]

You might see his legs, and that must never happen.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course SLC is still around, for people like you who fail to realize that a disk with almost 10 times the capacity but 1/10th the per block endurance is just as reliable if the bigger capacity isn't used, thanks to wear leveling, and probably much faster due to parallel access to more chips.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[schlachter]

To each his own...but I've got my OS and a huge amount of apps on my 256GB SSD and I've stil got 100GB free. The remainder of my data sits on an internal 500GB HD and a 2TB network drive.

I would think one of the best applications for a 1TB SSD is video/movie editing and data analysis...both of which would require swapping out HD contents on a regular basis.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[dgatwood]

A proper wear leveling algorithm takes care of that by periodically remapping content that doesn't change often so that low-use blocks can be reclaimed into the free pool. So in effect, yes, it is true unless your wear leveling algorithm sucks.

Re:72 TB is not a lot of data written

[schlachter]

Crucial wouldn't confirm the write-erase limit of the m4's flash chips, but it does publish endurance specifications for the drive as a whole. According to the company, the m4 can write 72 terabytes of data over its lifetime. Amortize that over a five-year span, and you're looking at 40GB per day.

Just noticed that Crucial made the same claim on their m4 drives...only 72TB seems like a lot more when you're dealing with a 128/256GB drive.

Still a ways to go

[GameboyRMH]

That's about 6x the cost of a hard drive, in terms of dollars per GB. If it was 2x or maybe even 4x I'd replace the RAID0 array in my gaming machine with one of these.

Re:Still a ways to go

[tantrum]

I'm already using striped SSD's in my gaming/photo/video rig. It is a bit overkill, but I'll never go back to use spinning disks for anything besides "long term storage".

Re:Still a ways to go

[sdguero]

Just get a 120 or 250 GB on sale for your OS and applications. Keep your data on a traditional HDD.

It's worth it dude. Trust me. The upgrade to SSD was the most noticeable single component upgrade I've ever done to one of my machines.

Re:SSD replacements?

[girlintraining]

(still regretting the purchasing of two velociraptors for RAID-0)

I suppose redundancy is important when cloning killer dinosaurs.

Re:SSD replacements?

[h4rr4r]

Too bad RAID0 won't give you any.

Re:SSD replacements?

[slashmydots]

Hey, I can put in a second 1TB+ magnetic drive, no problem. I'm WAY more concerned about the number of writes that a flash chip in an SSD can perform before it fails (2000-9000 usually). My estimation says I'd likely completely destroy a 256GB medium quality SSD in about a year. That's a problem. The way I understand it, it's per-chip, not per bit, and there are only like 16 chips in an average SSD. It'd take me a while to write 256GB 9000 times but if a 100MB write hits 3 different chips, that's a problem.

Re:72TB of total bytes written?

[ByOhTek]

if it were read, I'd agree with you, but there are a lot of things that don't get written /that/ often.

Primary OS, your application installs, main configuration files, possibly even some of your data.

Yeah, it'd suck for a swap/scratch disk, and for things like content files you may be working on (or the disk housing the current update/area info for your favorite MMO).

Reliability should be the focus

[GodfatherofSoul]

I really don't care about extra capacity for SSDs. I just set up a new laptop with a 256 GB SSD for the OS and 2 750 GBs in a RAID 1 for safe storage. So long as the SSD is big enough for the OS and a few apps installed for speed, I'm getting my money's worth. Now, if the SSD craps out fairly quickly warranty or not, then I have a problem.

Re:Reliability should be the focus

[PRMan]

I just put my old SSD in my old netbook and it really breathed life into that thing. It's actually usable now. Definitely makes a great upgrade for old laptops (where the spec'd drive is sometimes only 4200 rpm(!?!) and never more than 5400).

Re:That's great, but...

[jones_supa]

Do I have to click the link to see what "this" might be?

Re:SSD replacements?

[scheme]

No it decreases reliability by half. If any one of the drives fail, you cannot recover data off the other.

It's more than that. If p is the probability that one of the drives will fail in a given timespan, the chances of your array staying up is 1-(2*p + p^2) . The problem is that you need to consider the possibility of both drives failing so the probability of the array going down is p+p+p^2 so things are worse than just having two independent drives.