Manufacturer Crucial has published its latest solid state drive, the M500, which was announced during the CES in Las Vegas. The successor to the popular m4-drives must be in the course of the first quarter of this year in three formats appear.
The new M500-series would not only be in the standard 2,5″format ssd’s appear, but also in a msata version and a specially designed for ultrabooks suitable M2 format. For the latter format, a rectangular pcb 80 by 22 mm and 3.5 mm thick, and for the msata models, the maximum capacity of the M500 drives 480GB amounts. Smaller variants, of 120GB and 240GB, would also in all three of the formfactors come true. Only the largest packaging, the 2.5″ssds, with a capacity of 960GB are available.
The drives are made with 20nm produced mlc-nandgeheugen, that by IMFT, a joint venture between Intel and Crucial’s parent company Micron, is produced. Crucial will not which controller is to be applied, but from photos is that it is a Marvell 88SS9187 controller. The company reports, incidentally, own firmware to use. The performance of the drives depend on the capacity; the read speed is 500MB/s for all variants, but the write speed varies from 130MB/s to 400MB/s. Prices made Crucial yet not known, that should be in the introduction later this quarter follow.
