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Micron Technology, manufacturer of semiconductor devices has announced the availability of cheap 256GB solid state drives in near future.

Solid state drives contain no moving parts hence they are less fragile than existing hard disks.

For those who are closely following SSD industry this news doesn’t come as a surprise because in May both Intel and Micron announced that they have made world’s first sub-40nm Nand memory device used in solid state drives.

The RealSSD from Micron is aimed at both corporate (enterprise) and consumer (laptop) markets. RealSSD in laptop will be offered at cheaper rate than enterprise ones.

For corporate market they have developed RealSSD P200 model which uses single-level cell (SLC) technology while for consumer market RealSSD C200 will be offered which is based on multi-level cell (MLC).

Although MLC based dives are larger in capacity, they do not offer the same speed and realiability as SLC based drives.

It is interesting to note that current Apple MacBook Air and Lenovo ThinkPad X300 uses SLC based SSD.

C200 drives will be available in following form factors:

• 2.5 inch
  - up to 256 GB capacity
• 1.8 inch
  - from 32GB to 128GB capacity

Micron’s P200 SSDs consume about one-tenth the power of a typical data center hard drive, operating at 2.5 watts in active mode and under at 0.3 watts in idle. They have also achieved sub-millisecond latency while a typical enterprise hard disk drive has an average latency of approximately eight milliseconds.