Tuesday, May 3rd 2016
Crucial Readies the MX300 Performance SSD
Crucial is reportedly readying a successor to its best-selling MX200 performance-segment SSD. The new MX300, which will initially be launched in a 750 GB capacity (model: CT750MX300SSD1), will feature 3D (stacked) NAND flash memory. This particular model serves up sequential transfer speeds of up to 530 MB/s reads, with up to 510 MB/s writes. Looking at the way Crucial is pricing the drive in Japan (JPY ¥24,000), its stateside pre-tax MSRP could very well be sub-$200, working out to a price/GB of at most $0.26. According to the source, the drive could launch later today.
Source:
Hermitage Akihabara
24 Comments on Crucial Readies the MX300 Performance SSD
>3D TLC flash
Pick one. Also pretty odd capacity. Even though they are using 384Gbit dies, they should configure them to more common capacities like 480 and 960GB.
I like Crucial, still have their M4 SSD in my old laptop, but they should really be a bit more competitive considering Micron makes NAND as well.
I'm tempted to get a couple of these and get rid of both mechanical drives I still have. But that would be about $400 and my video card is also in line for an upgrade this year.
Also, if this one will be a sub $200 drive and they can't fit enough NAND into 2.5" form factor, why the hell no one offers 3.5" SSD drives? All cases have slots for these anyway. Just cram 2x MX300 worth of NAND into a 3.5" case and call it a day. 1.5 TB for under 400€, I can see how more people would get these, even in 3.5" size, entirely ditching damn spinning drives.
Under $200 in the US www.macmall.com/p/Crucial-Internal-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~40056923~pdp.bacjidjj
Once flash prices go down even further and controller supports comes, than we'll see more 2TB and 4TB ssds (outside of samsung).
I think the real problem are SSD controllers. Most companies only support up to 1TB. And since only few make their own controllers, they all depend on those SSD controller makers. Where Samsung makes their own and so they could easily modify the controller and produce such drives on their own terms. Only one with such capability would be Toshiba since it now owns OCZ and their Barefoot controllers. They could do this, but for some reason they don't seem to be interested. Hm.
Unrelated, but the most iI have paid for a video card was almost $300. I always buy mid-range. No argument there. Probably an inventory issue. Combined with the fact that a new form factor would need dedicated QC resources. Combined with the fact that most users don't pay that much for home storage drives (remember, kids these days like their stuff in the cloud). You get the idea.
And again, I eagerly await the day when I'll be HDD free. I just don't see manufacturers as proactively sabotaging progress. It will happen when it will happen. And these MX300 drives are one more step in the right direction.
Bottom line, it's not guaranteed to last for ages. And if 4k video catches on, we'd be needing upgrades even before the warranty runs out. But hey, maybe intel's X-Point can do even better ;)
And even if I made 4K content myself, my upload is too crappy even for 1080p so at least in my situation, it just doesn't matter. And when so many factors apply to same content, it means this automatically applies to a lot of people and not just me.
I can't find the source but at the 15/16nm level, a 2D cell uses 10 - 20 electrons to store the charge. 3D has gone back up to a 40-ish nm process and a cell has 500-ish electrons to store the charge.
So with the larger cell size endurance is much much better than the 2D products and you can use a higher program voltage to get better performance.
TL;DR: 3D TLC will be more performant than 2D MLC.
Also, 3D NAND is excellent stuff.
SSD will be boot storage, and with shortstroking my HDD, ill get 300GB of fast HDD storage, and 700GB of slow speed storage ( storage for docx, movies, music and other stuff).
Still you can get decent performance with combos than a single price hungry SSD.