Crucial Launches MX100 SSD At Well Under 50 Cents Per GiB

MojoKid (1002251) writes "Crucial has been on a tear as of late. In the last few weeks alone, the company has released a couple of new series of solid state drives, one targeting the enthusiast segment (the M550) and the other targeting data centers (the M500DC). Today, Crucial is at it again with the launch of the brand new MX100 series. The Crucial MX100 series of solid state drives is somewhat similar to the M550 in that they both use the same Marvell controller. The MX100, however, is outfitted with more affordable 16nm NAND flash, and as such, the drives are priced aggressively at about .43 per GiB. However, these MX100 series of drives are still rated for 550MB/s sequential reads with 500MB/s (512GB), 330MB/s (256GB), or 150MB/s (128GB) and random read and write IOPS of 90K – 80K and 85K – 40K, respectively. The drives carry a 3-year warranty and are rated for 72TB total bytes written (TBW), which equates to 40GB written per day for 5 years. Performance-wise, these new lower cost SSDs, are on par with some of the fastest SSDs currently on the market but starting at $79.99 for the 128GB drive, they're relatively rather cheap."

Comments

Ye Gods, an Ad

[debatecoach]

Is this supposed to be informative, or an ad? Has Crucial purchased a stake in slashdot?

Re:Ye Gods, an Ad

[mcrbids]

Perhaps it's an ad, but it's one that interests me. I come here to find out the latest developments in tech, and the continuing advances of SSDs is something I find interesting.

HDDs have become so huge that the biggest problem isn't storage capacity, or even bandwidth: it's IOPS. It's pretty lame that I can store literally many millions of documents in a hard disk cluster that can only delivery a few hundred IOPS per second. Do the math. It takes forever to get your data out, especially if they are small documents!

SSDs don't have this problem. 50,000 IOPS is "no big deal" for an SSD, meaning that even if you have 40 million tiny 10k documents, you can still saturate your 6 Gbit SATA interface with sweet, sweet data.

We switched our DB servers to SSDs and saw over 90% reduction in average query latency. Next up is our file stores, which use ZFS. Our next step is an SSD cache for ZFS, and then as prices continue to tumble, we'll switch to all SSDs everywhere.

Re:Ye Gods, an Ad

[mcrbids]

IOPs are anything but meaningless. For any kind of performance computing, they are one of the most commonly unrecognized bottleneck.

IOPS is simple: how many random seeks can your storage device perform? If you can scootch your heads to the starting sector once per second, you have 1 IOP. Divide the rotational speed of your drive by 60. EG: 7200/60 = 120. That's the literal maximum number of seeks you can get out of your hard disk heads assuming that there is no seek time.

The "k of operations" is irrelevant when discussing IOPS.

How an idea so simple could be so commonly misunderstood is beyond me. It's true that IOPS won't matter if you are streaming a single, large media file. It's equally true that you can't serve more than about 120 random seeks in a second on a 7200 RPM drive. This is disguised a bit because your OS will try to minimize the seeks and aggregate seeks that are similar and/or close together.

SSDs are now only about 5x the cost of HDDs in many cases. In past years, it's typical to have, multi-disk arrays solely to improve performance. In these cases, a single SSD can be not only dramatically faster, but significantly cheaper to boot.

Function Not Working

[Oysterville]

I have the Disable Ads box checked. Technical glitch?

Re:Function Not Working

[Jahoda]

It's due to be fixed in the next beta release.

Re: Can I trust 'em?

[binarylarry]

You should never trust any drive and always backup your data.

Re:Good prices, not spectacular

[fnj]

Also, the MX100 has data protection capacitors to ride out power fails without corrupting data. The Samsung 840 EVO has none. That means one hell of a lot to me and is much more important than comparative raw speeds.