Tuesday, March 18th 2014
Crucial Announces the M550 Series SSDs
Crucial announced its M550 series of performance SSDs, succeeding its existing M500 series. Built in 7 mm-thick 2.5-inch SATA, mSATA, and M.2 form-factors, the M550 series offers higher sequential transfer rates, and comes in higher capacities near existing price-points, over its predecessor. It also introduces a handful new features, such as NWA (native write acceleration), RAIN (redundant array of independent NAND), adaptive thermal protection (ATP), and hardware encryption. The drives appear to be based on a Marvell-made controller platform, with Micron-made MLC NAND flash. The mSATA 6 Gb/s and M.2 models come in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB; while the 2.5-inch SATA 6 Gb/s models include 1 TB capacity. The drives offer sequential reads as high as 550 MB/s, with up to 500 MB/s of sequential writes. They're backed by 3-year warranties, and should eventually replace the M500 series from their existing price points.
10 Comments on Crucial Announces the M550 Series SSDs
The smallest form factor of M.2 is actually quite a bit smaller than mSATA in all dimensions (height/width/depth), so if physical size is a concern, then M.2 is actually the superior option.
www.anandtech.com/show/6293/ngff-ssds-putting-an-end-to-proprietary-ultrabook-ssd-form-factors