Micron announces SSD lines
IDAHO BASED MICRON has announced two new lines of flash memory solid state drives (SSDs), aimed at enterprise server and notebook PC applications.
The company said its next generation RealSSD models include the P200 for servers and the C200 for notebooks. Both SSD lines are based upon Micron's high-performance single-level cell (SLC) NAND technology and attach via 3Gbs SATA interfaces to achieve up to 250MBs maximum data transfer rates.
"We are seeing SSD interest in a variety of applications where historically hard disk drives have reigned. For many, the most logical place is in notebook computers, but there is incredible value for SSDs in enterprise server systems, " said Dean Klein, Micron's VP of memory system development.
In its announcement, Micron said its SSDs offer performance advantages, power savings and reliability benefits over hard disk drives (HDDs).
SSDs perform about ten times faster than HDDs, exhibiting sub-millisecond data access latency compared to average HDD data seek latency of approximately eight milliseconds.
SSDs consume about one-tenth the electrical power of typical HDDs, running at 0.3 watts when idle and only 2.5 watts while active, whereas HDDs usually draw between 8 to 28 watts. Since they use so little power, SSDs also require virtually no cooling, which also reduces power consumption.
SSDs are also more reliable than HDDs. Using wear-leveling technology, SSDs offer mean time before failure (MTBF) ratings of approximately two million hours compared to typical HDD MTBF ratings of between 300,000 to 500,000 hours.
Micron's P200 SSDs for servers will come in 2.5-inch modules with storage densities from 16GB to 128GB, while its C200 SSDs for notebook PCs will come in 1.8-inch and 2.5-inch modules with capacities from 16GB to 256GB.
Micron has not yet announced any pricing information for its new SSD lines, but we don't imagine they'll be what you'd call inexpensive.
SSDs are also not ideal for all applications, however, so users considering installing SSD data storage devices in place of existing HDD-based data storage subsystems should trial and benchmark their alternatives. µ
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the technology of solid state disk has alot of promise, but it is yet in its infancy. I am sure your numbers are askew. the technology has yet to demonstrate, or dominate as your article professes. The power consumption has shown to be as great or greater than multiplatter HDDs. The problem in the current generation is the inability to spin down! the average power draw is greater than the average hard drive, It is as of now a marketing ploy. I would want you to test battery lives with the current models versus 5400 RPM HDDs. now with the point of data safety, anything that needs to be safeguarded needs to be backed up regardless of what kind of medium it is stored on. The theoretical failure rates, and the ability to withstand several G's of impact sound promising,. The problem is their is little real word data to back that up. I am guessing the RMA rate will be equal to or great than HDD for years to come.
I sure hope every memory chip maker on the planet hops on the SSD bandwagon...I can't WAIT for a 256GB SSD to be in my notebook. When they'll be about the same price as similar capacity hard drives were a few years ago, that is.
"...SSDs offer mean time before failure (MTBF) ratings of..."

Hah! The chief hair splitter says: MTBF=Mean time between failures.
Something else worth mentioning is that SSD do not suffer from head failure or disk crash. Eventually, I will be replacing all of my computer's hdd with ssd because of this, as backing up is such a pain.
I think you'll find the "consumer" parts are slower multi-level cell memory. Still sound promising though.