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:SSD replacements?

[girlintraining]

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

I suppose redundancy is important when cloning killer dinosaurs.

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.