Micron’s RealSSD C300

The new solid-state drives by Micron will be the industry’s fastest, the company claims.

Micron Technology Inc. has reportedly announced today its newest SSD (solid-state drive). This product will be the fastest for notebooks and desktops out there, according to the company.

The RealSSD C300 has allegedly nearly 50% better data transfer rate in comparison to other similar products.  The company claims it is the first drive to take advantage of SATA 3.0 and ONFI 2.1(Open NAND Flash Interface) specifications, offering high reading and writing speeds.

"This drive is the fastest on 6Gbit/sec. SATA and it's the fastest on 3Gbit/sec. SATA," according to Dean Klein, VP of memory system development at Micron. "So even on a system that doesn't have a 6Gbit port, it's an impressive drive."

The new solution uses a 34nm lithography technology and a 32Gbit MLC (multi-level cell) NAND chip which handles up to 30,000 write& erase cycles.

Klein has allegedly claimed that their product is the “industry bar” now leaving Intel’s X25-M SSD behind.

Micron’s RealSSD C300 employs the fast ONFI 2.1 specification, which delivers a data transfer speed of up to 166MT (megatransfers) with one MT equaling 1 million data transfers per second.

"The time it takes to get the data to the NAND and off the channel to do something else is shortened, so even on writes, your performance can go up significantly," Klein says. "As a developer of leading-edge NAND technology, along with our sophisticated controller and firmware innovations, Micron is well positioned to tune our drives to take full advantage of the faster speeds achieved using the SATA 6Gbit/sec. interface. The combination of these technology advancements has enabled the RealSSD C300 drive to far outshine the competition."

Supposedly, the C300 SSDs will start shipping in Q1 of 2010 and will come in sizes of 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch. Depending on the storage capacity which is expected to be 128GB and 256GB, they will be priced at $350 and $715, when 1,000+ units are ordered.