Review: Micron M600 Performs Well, Built to Last

With the release in September of its M600 SSD series of solid-state drives, Micron Technology claims new firmware inside the drive is able to switch between SLC or MLC write modes at will, thereby gaining the speed and durability of SLC flash while employing far less costly MLC NAND in the drive.

Prices range from $80 to around $450 in capacities up to 1 TB.

According to John Tanguy, a senior technical engineer at Micron, he and his colleagues have figured out how to change write modes on the fly based on the time sensitivity of the operation. Micron calls the feature Dynamic Write Acceleration, or DWA.

"We can vary the size and location of our SLC NAND," Tanguy told CRN. "And as data starts to age, DWA can move it in the background during garbage collection to more efficient locations in MLC mode."

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This has the added benefit, he said, of spreading the usage across more cells. This wear-leveling process serves to prolong the drive's life.

"On any component, we can design a variety of sizes and locations for SLC 'cache' and swap between SLC and MLC mode at any time," he said.

The M600 drives use Micron's 16nm MLC NAND flash and are available in 128, 256, 512 GB and 1 TB capacities.

For testing, Micron sent the CRN Test Center 256 GB and 1 TB models. Our testing focused on the former, which performed at or near its specified maximums.

To test the M600, we fired up our high-end test fixture, which is built around an Intel Core i7-4790 processor running at 4.0 GHz on an EVGA Z97 Classified motherboard with 8 GB DDR3 memory and running 64-bit Windows 7 Ultimate N. As always, we used IOMeter to measure transaction processing and data throughput performance using an optimization methodology that gradually increases the number of pending I/O operations per target until performance levels off.

Micron rates the M600 SSD at 560 MBps for sequential reads and 510 MBps for sequential writes. In our tests, the M600 got closest to those marks when performing sequential read operations with 32K packets. With a single worker and 24 pending IOs, the drive delivered a sustained data transfer rate of 437 MBps. When 50 percent randomness was introduced, throughput dropped to 141 MBps.

To test the drive's suitability to transaction-processing applications, testers switched to 512-byte packets, with which the M600 delivered its best sustained rate of 42,500 IOps with sequential read operations.

Only time will tell if Micron's wear-leveling techniques will stand true. The company claims its drives will endure for five years of data cycling -- that's the equivalent of filling the drive to capacity and erasing it every day for five years. What is certain is that the Micron M600 SSDs are competitively priced at $80 for 128 GB, $140 for 256 GB, $260 for 512 GB and $480 for 1 TB.

All but the 1 TB model also are available in the mSATA form factor. The M600 drives are being sold through the OEM channel and are intended for laptops, tablets, video capture devices and high-end desktops and workstations.

PUBLISHED NOV. 11, 2014