[Hardware] Micron M600 SSD Review (256GB/1TB)

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As a reader on our site, you should be very familiar with Crucial and their highly regarded consumer SSDs. Most recently recently, they announced their newest drive the MX100. In our review, we found it to be a great value SSD as it offers its owners many enterprise grade features at a very competitive price, due in part to Micron’s latest 16nm MLC NAND.

 

 

On the other hand, Micron is typically known for their joint NAND flash venture with Intel, called IMFT. They are also known for their OEM and enterprise flash memory products. Their client level drives are typically developed with the Crucial consumer SSDs under the same team. This time around, Micron decided to split up development for their next generation client SSD and Crucial’s latest consumer drive, the MX100. Today, Micron we are reporting on their latest client level drive, the M600.

 

 

The Micron M600 series doesn’t just consist of 2.5″ 7mm drives as the Crucial MX100 series, the family expands into M.2 and mSATA variants as well. This allows Micron to supply for the ever-growing ultrathin PC tablet market as well as the corporate notebook and workstation demands. What has come from this strategic move is greater endurance, improved performance, and an expanded capacity and form factor portfolio.

MICRON M600 SPECIFICATIONS, PRICING, AND AVAILABILITY

 

 

The M600 has much better endurance over previous client drives. Typically, Micron’s drives were rated for up to 72TB of writes. This next generation is rated for up to 5 times greater endurance, even after the transition to 16nm 128Gbit NAND. For 128GB, it is rated for 100TB total bytes written and the 256GB drive is rated for 200TB TBW. The 512GB is rated for 300TB TBW and finally, the 1TB drive is rated for up to 400TB TBW.

 

 

A new feature added to the M600 is dynamic write acceleration, the key word being dynamic. It allows for better performance, lower power consumption, and lower write amplification. Micron’s latest NAND technology can operate in SLC mode or MLC mode on the fly. There isn’t a set amount as with other SLC mode caching technologies. This allows for a dynamic pool of SLC-mode NAND which dramatically increases write speeds on smaller capacity drives, even up until they are 99% full. This feature is not enabled in the 512GB and 1TB 2.5″ models due to their design allowing full SATA 6Gb/s write saturation. However, it is enabled in all other capacities and form factors.

 

 

Furthermore, Micron offers variants of this drive that are self-encrypting and non-self-encrypting. SED drives have AES 256-bit hardware encryption from the built-in controller encryption engine. It is TCG Opal 2.0 and IEEE1667 compliant to support the Windows eDrive standard. Micron has also worked closely with WinMagic and Wave to ensure the M600 is compatible with their encryption management software.

Other features to aid in data integrity and lower power consumption include RAIN reliability technology, device sleep, data path protection, and adaptive thermal monitoring.