Micron/Crucial M550 SSD

Micron Technology has announced its latest personal storage class solid-state drive. The M550 SSD is designed to meet the needs of high-performance computing, ultrathin and media/video applications. It is said to offers 20 times higher performance than a traditional hard drive while consuming less power. It enables quick boot-up, file access, program access and wake from sleep; and efficient power management, drawing as little as 0.15 W during normal operation.

The design integrates Micron NAND and firmware to deliver up to 95,000 input/output operations/s. The drive’s sequential speeds reach up to 550 MBps for reads and 500 MBps for writes, which maxes out the capabilities of the SATA 6 Gbps interface. Other features include hardware encryption; device sleep low-power mode; data protection; and adaptive thermal management.

The drive utilises Micron’s 20 nm multilevel cell NAND Flash to achieve terabyte capacity on the 2.5″ form factor. The 2.5″ SSD is offered in 128 GB, 256 GB, 512 GB and 1 TB capacities. The smaller M.2 and mSATA form factors will be available in capacities up to 512 GB. The drive is compatible with both PC and Mac systems.