sf  on December 2nd, 2009

Congratulations on your new product announcement. Great to see Micron introducing a product that pushes SSD technology forward with SATA 3.0 and a ONFI2.1 NAND interface. These are big steps, assuming your not seeing anything negative on the random R/W and IOps side. I had a couple of questions about your new C300 product:

1) Micron’s SSDs have typically been enterprise products in the past. Any plans to make the C300 available for consumers (referencing your PC user centric benchmarks)?

2) You mention “Drive Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (via Marvell HBS)”. Is this a pure Marvell SSD controller or a combination with Micron providing the ONFI2.1 NAND controller part? What does the HBS acronym stand for?

3) What’s the reason behind the 128GB capacity entry point (e.g. # of parallel NAND interfaces) will smaller capacities on the roadmap?

4) You mentioned ATTO benchmarks and I couldn’t find them. Do you have any 4k random R/W numbers (crystaldiskmark2.2) or IOps numbers that you can share?

5) I’ve been following the ONFI standard a bit and was loking forward to an SSD that used it to see how the NAND interface improvements translated to real world SSD performance numbers. Can you share anything from your experiences (e.g. improved IOps or Random R/W, saturate the 6Gb/s interface during reads, more performance with less NAND interface lanes)?

Justin Sykes  on December 2nd, 2009

Thanks, SF. We’re excited, too, to see what our customers will do with our new C300, now that we’re able to push through the old performance bottlenecks. Answers to your questions:

1. The C300 is a consumer drive—meant for laptop and desktop systems. It will be available for purchase via distributors in the first quarter of 2010 and you’ll see it shipping in laptops from major OEMs by mid summer.

2. The line “Drive Interface: SATA 6Gb/s (via Marvell HBS)” is a reference to the fact that we’re using a Marvell host-bus-adapter (HBA) PCI card to get a SATA 6 Gb/s interface on the machine (there are some SATA 6 Gb/s motherboards out there, but this wasn’t one of them). The SSD’s interface is a native SATA 6 Gb/s. As for our controller, it is a proprietary Micron-Marvell design.

3. We chose 128GB because it achieves a reasonable balance between overall cost and capacity. We have a 256GB drive as well and we have future plans for lower and higher capacity points.

4. The ATTO benchmarks start at 2:46 in the video.

5. The C300 delivers very high IOP performance. In testing we are seeing 4K random writes up to 40K IOPS and up to 50K random read IOPS.

Richard  on December 2nd, 2009

What is this leading competitor you tested against? Judging by the ATTO scores and the drive size, I would say that it was the Intel X-25M SSD G2, with the trim firmware, but I would prefer it if you mentioned who the competitor was and what its product is explicitly.

Furthermore, SSD performance is primarily determined by 4KB random read/write performance, which was not tested. You can certainly produce numbers of a very large magnitude with sequential performance, but the actual performance of your product will be based on its random read/write performance on small amounts of data, so the benchmarks, which provide a ceiling of what the maximum performance is, provide no lower bound to how bad things can become, which renders all of the data useless.

Your drive could have JMicron level performance and that would not necessarily be reflected by the benchmarks you ran. Please run benchmarks that test read/write performance on 4KB file sizes.

sf  on December 2nd, 2009

Great to hear that the C300 is targeted at consumers. Those ATTO 4K random writes and reads are way off the chart. 2x of what I consider a good consumer SSD should have and 10x the write IOps of the current consumer leader.

Is this using your 2-bit per cell MLC product with the 30k cycle endurance? If so any chance we’ll see Micron also surprising us on the pricing?

GullLars  on December 3rd, 2009

This seems like a great drive. I just have a few questions left after this video.

1. What ONFI standard is this drive using?

2. How many internal parallell flash-channels does this unit have? (brand x in the video has 10)

3. Does this unit fully support ACHI and make use of NCQ?

4. Will it support TRIM?

5. How much spare area is reserved for the controller?

6. What is the SUSTAINED sequential write and SUSTAINED 4KB random write numbers?

7: Can you share a rough, non-binding, estimate of the prices of these drives? (say nearest $10-50)

Also, do you have the opportunity to run IOmeter and make following graphs?
A: 4KB 100% random 100% read, Queue Depth scaling at X axis 2^n n=0-8. (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32…)
B: 4KB 100% random 100% write, Queue Depth scaling at X axis 2^n n=0-8.
And C: 8KB 80% random 80% read, Queue Depth scaling at X axis 2^n n=0-8.
This will provide very interresting information for all us benchmarkers.

The IOPS info you reply with to the first post is about the same as the enterprise version of brand x, wich is really nice if the IOPS figures you quote are sustained numbers for an MLC device.

I currently own 2x Mtron Pro SSDs and 2x OCZ Vertex, but if the prices on these drives become reasonable i think i might just buy a few of these too

GullLars  on December 3rd, 2009

I also have another partially related question.
It’s regarding the PCI express cards you posted a demo of last november that did 200.000 IOPS random read at 2KB and 800MB/s bandwitdh.
Are you considering releasing PCIe based SSDs in the comming year?

This seems to me the optimal solution, since you can avoid the latency of HBA’s designed for rotating media, and also the bandwidth limitations these often have. There are already (MLC) PCIe SSDs in the market that beat your new SATA 6Gbit SSD in both bandwith and IOPS. Even the lower end PCIe SSD can do 600-1000 MB/s reads and 300-400MB/s writes, though these have mediocre IOPS.

FS  on December 3rd, 2009

Hey,

I was wondering, what model is the other SSD that you are comparing the C300 to?

Justin Sykes  on December 3rd, 2009

SF,
The NAND you are referring to is eNAND, and the C300 is not using it. For consumer/client SSDs, with our advanced wear-management, eNAND is overkill. However, this drive is not using run-of-the-mill consumer 2-bit per cell MLC NAND, either. Being a NAND manufacturer gives us flexibility in this area.

You can expect the C300 to be very competitively priced.

GullLars  on December 3rd, 2009

@SF, ATTO does NOT test random packets, it is sequential. This can easily be seen by testing a harddrive.

@Richard, the benchmark numbers shows the X drive in this test is Intel x25-M gen2 160GB with TRIM firmware. It delivers 35-40K 4KB random read IOPS and 15K 4KB random write IOPS at a queue depth of 32, and read IOPS scales well from QD 1-10 at wich point it gets deminishing returns.

I still hope to hear if C300 supports AHCI and makes use of NCQ, the number of parallell flash channels, wich ONFI standard (2.1?), TRIM support, spare area, and if 40K/50K r/w 4KB random IOPS is sustained. If you can’t share that’s OK too, but a reply would be nice.

Justin Sykes  on December 3rd, 2009

Hey GullLars, You’ll find most of the answers to your questions on our web site: http://www.micron.com/products/real_ssd/ssd/client/index. It’s ONFI 2.1 NAND on 8 channels, and yes, we do support TRIM.

Sorry, we don’t reveal future product plans. PCIe does provide some very interesting performance potential, but the consumer market isn’t where these devices will take off.

Justin Sykes  on December 3rd, 2009

Thanks for the comment, Richard. Calling out competitors directly can sometimes invite unnecessary grief–besides, it’s the numbers that matter. We’ll let the tech bloggers do the labeled head-to-heads when the C300 is out in a few months.

Note: We didn’t have a chance to include a random/IOP test this time, but we’re planning to. Stay tuned–tomorrow, our random numbers won’t disappoint

GullLars  on December 3rd, 2009

Thanks for the answer.

I would have thought you would go for more than 8 channels. It seems to me you could deliver more performance pr $ by having 1 NAND chip pr channel at the lowest capasity, and then increase capacity by adding more chips serially at the same channels. Assuming you use 32Gbit chips for 8GB capacity pr unit, the smallest C300 has 2 chips pr channel. Maybe this is because of controller complexity as the number of channels grow. On the other hand, the competing “drive x”‘s 10-channel controller has been on the market for over a year now, and another competitors products wich launch in Q1 2010 will have 16 channels.

Assuming performance scaling by # channels, a 16 channel drive with a controller that could cope on a SATA 6Gbps interface would saturate the interface in sequential reads, deliver 100.000 random read 4KB IOPS, 430MB/s sequential writes, and 80.000 random write 4KB IOPS.
By looking at competing products’ sustained write, i would guess you manage to write to 16 NAND chips at a time (or more at higher capacity) since the transfer-time is lower than array-time for writes, and as such write performance wouldn’t scale noticably by doubling the channels on the 128GB C300, but could double for 256GB.

Does the C200 also use 8 channels?

Looking forward to the random IOPS benchmark numbers

JMEDC  on December 4th, 2009

Thank you for the product demos. The performance of the RealSSD C300 is most impressive. Look forward to their arrival in the retail channel. A few questions:

1. Is the controller firmware upgradeable?

2. Will the drives be sold with adapter brackets to enable their installation in 3.5 inch drive bays?

2. Will Micron be demonstrating these drives at the January 2010 CES?

Thank You.

Justin Sykes  on December 8th, 2009

Thanks for the post, JMEDC.
1. Yes, firmware is upgradeable.
2. Micron won’t be handling retail sales for the C300, so we can’t promise what will be included (although a 3.5” adapter is a pretty standard offering). Watch for announcements of a distribution partner early next year.
3. Our SSD group won’t be at CES this year, but we will be at Storage Visions (Jan. 5-6) in Vegas. We’ll be hosting a keynote that explains why in-depth NAND expertise is going to be critical in the next generation of SSDs.