New Accolades for the RealSSD C300

Our RealSSD C300 has garnered some impressive industry accolades since its introduction back in December. Recently, the RealSSD C300 was awarded the Most Innovative Solid-State Storage Technology from UBM TechInsights, beating out both Intel and Toshiba’s drives. This award is great validation for Micron’s C300 design since TechInsights’ selection process includes a rigorous product tear-down and in-depth technical analysis. (Side note, in the coming weeks we’ll be featuring a post from an analyst at TechInsights that provides more information on the benchmarks that went into review of the drives they tested. Stay tuned!)

We also continue to see great feedback from reviewers  and press—we’re excited about some recent reviews and rankings from Tom’s Hardware and PC World.

The analysts at Tom’s Hardware noted that the C300 “remains the very best choice these days.” While Melissa Perenson at PC World states that the C300 offers “top-flight overall performance, and the best write performance we’ve seen.”

So my question is, do you have a C300? If not, you should. I have one in my MacBook Pro and the difference is night and day. Visit Crucial.com to order yours.

Why SSD Testing Standards are Important

One of the great benefits of the Flash Memory Summit is the opportunity to interact with other people and companies that are serious about advancing Flash technology. One of those is Eden Kim, CEO of Calypso Systems—a company that builds SSD testers and is helping lead the push for standardized test methods (you might remember our recent post on their P300 performance testing results).

On Wednesday, I interviewed Eden about what his company does, how their testers work, and why standards are so important. He also shared his thoughts on how our P300 SSD did against the competition. Take a look:

Updates from the Flash Memory Summit

The 2010 Flash Memory Summit has been a great show—lots of attendees and new innovations in flash (remember our post from yesterday?). For those of you who couldn’t make it, we pulled together a quick video summary of what’s going on in the Micron booth.

The RealSSD P300—Dramatic Performance Improvements for Enterprise Apps

I had the chance to sit-down with Dean Klein, Vice President of Memory System Development at Micron to talk about the RealSSD™ P300 solid-state drive that was announced today. We had a good conversation about the drive, how it compares competitively, and why it’s important to be a NAND manufacturer in SSDs.

Take a look at the video and if you have any questions, let us know. I’ll bring Dean in to answer a few!

What’s the future for PCM?

With the recent Numonyx acquisition, we’ve heard lots of questions about Micron’s commitment to phase change memory (PCM). Ed Doller, Vice President and Chief Memory Systems Architect, addressed some of these questions in a recent keynote at the MemCon conference in San Jose. His talk focused on PCM’s future as a viable, next-generation, nonvolatile memory and its position in the memory hierarchy. We’ll provide a video of his full presentation later this week on our blog.

In the meantime, we wanted to share some in-depth insight on PCM and the reasons why Micron is supporting this technology. Greg Atwood, Micron senior fellow and resident PCM expert, has authored a paper on “The Evolution of Phase Change Memory,” which offers some interesting technical perspective on the product, its benefits, and future potential.

For a high-level description of PCM history and features, download the white paper.

You can also request PCM samples and read more about our current PCM product line at micron.com/pcm (PCM product details are listed under our “Navigate Numonyx” flyout as we work to integrate the two web sites). As always, feel free to comment if you have any questions.

25nm NAND Scores Award for Most Innovative Process Technology

In the battle for process technology leadership, Micron and Intel’s NAND Flash joint venture, IM Flash Technologies (IMFT), wins. Micron and Intel’s 25nm NAND was awarded Most Innovative Process Technology by UBM TechInsights, beating out Samsung’s 48nm 1Gb DDR3 and Hynix’ 32nm 2Gb MLC Flash, among other leading memory processes.

Here’s an excerpt from TechInsight’s press release announcing IMFT’s receipt of this award (the full press release can be viewed here.)

“The technical and manufacturing prowess of IMFT has been proven once again by the introduction of their 25nm 8GB 2-bit/cell MLC Flash. While most pundits have speculated that NAND has hit the wall, IMFT has continued to be successful with their aggressive path of NAND scaling.”

TechTalk: Embedded Strategy

Last week I was down in Micron’s Folsom office and interviewed Glen Hawk, Vice President of the Embedded Solutions Group to learn more about the recent acquisition of Numonyx and how it has helped shape a new era of growth for Micron in the Embedded market. Take a look at the video below.

Building an Ecosystem of RLDRAM® 3 Memory Partners, A Discussion with Xilinx

Micron recently announced its new RLDRAM 3 memory designed specifically for high bandwidth, networking applications. Micron is working with a broad ecosystem of partners including Xilinx, a leading FPGA provider, who is designing RLDRAM 3 memory into their next generation, Virtex 7 line of products.

We had an opportunity to sit down with Rina Raman, Xilinx’s senior director of applications and technical marketing, to talk about their products, collaboration with Micron, and the broader trends affecting the networking market. Here are some highlights from that discussion.

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The 64GB RealSSD™ C300: Compelling Performance, Affordable Price

Lexar Media today introduced the 64GB RealSSD™ C300, extending its award-winning portfolio to offer a high performing and affordable SSD option. Like its predecessors, the 64GB RealSSD C300 natively supports SATA 6Gb/s, offering the industry’s most compelling consumer SSD solution for capacity, price and performance.

We thought our readers might want to know more about the newest entry to the RealSSD line of products, so we sat down with Ben Thiel in Micron’s SSD group to shed some light on these new drives and trends in market adoption.

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It’s Earth Day. What Role Do SSDs Have in “Greening-Up” the Data Center?

In recognition of Earth Day, we thought we’d publish a post on a certain “green” topic that we’re passionate about around here—the power and performance efficiencies achieved by using SSDs in enterprise servers. As you know, Micron has a lot to say on the topic, so we decided change it up a bit and bring in a longtime storage industry veteran to provide a different perspective. (BTW, we’ll have more to say on Micron SSDs in the enterprise here soon … stay tuned.)

While at Storage Networking World last week, we had the chance to meet up with Ray Lucchesi, president and lead storage analyst with Silverton Consulting, as well as blogger extraordinaire for RayOnStorage.com. We asked him to shed some light on the role of SSDs “greening-up” the data center:

Thanks for talking with us. To kick off the discussion, let’s look big picture at the challenges facing data centers today. Could you provide a little insight for our readers on what the top issues are for data center managers?

I think the problems facing data centers today center around 3 main themes:

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