NAND so it begins: Micron mounts head-on attack against 10K disks

Micron has started shipping its 2.5-inch 5210 ION flash drive, positioning it as a 10,000rpm disk drive replacement offering much better read access performance for more or less the same price. The drive was first announced in May. The low cost (low for flash, at least) comes from its use of 64-layer 3D NAND in QLC (4bits/ …

[Detective Emil]

Enterprise? SATA??

Any 10k drives I might want to replace have SAS interfaces. Yes, the controllers will talk to SATA drives too, but maybe I like what SAS offers above and beyond SATA.

[defiler]

Re: Enterprise? SATA??

This, 100%. But they don't want to cut into their Enterprise SAS profits, I expect.

If they were SAS and competitive with the 10k drives in our SANs, I'd be filling out an order this week...

[Peter2]

Re: Enterprise? SATA??

At that price, i'd be doing the same.

[Piro]

Re: Enterprise? SATA??

Well, yeah. If it wants to be an Enterprise drive when it grows up, it needs to be 12Gbit SAS dual-port... A bit more speed, and that all important redundancy...

[pyite42]

Where can I get a WLC drive to try?

More seriously - there is a typo near the middle of your article... WLC instead of QLC.

[Christian Berger]

Re: Where can I get a WLC drive to try?

Actually it's "2 Bit" instead of "1 Bit".

[druck]

Re: Where can I get a WLC drive to try?

And the 3rd mistake on that line is DLC instead of SLC.

Corrections sent.

[Charles 9]

Sounds tempting, but the price point is still too high, especially at the consumer end of the spectrum. This smacks of what I call a WIRE drive (Write-Infrequently, Read-Extensively), which is an excellent class of drive for frequent recall of mostly-static data (like a multimedia archive).

[Anonymous Coward]

You can already buy Crucial MX500 2TB for £250+VAT, WD Blue 2TB about the same (both M2 and 2.5"), or Samsung Evo 860 2TB for £315+VAT.

These are regular MLC/3D SSD drives, with SATA interface, but without crippled write performance.

So why buy the Micron one again?

[Charles 9]

Because Micron offers a model at 7.5TB? For some, capacity matters.

[ecarlseen]

Pathetic DWPD? No dual-port SAS?

These aren't so much read-centric as "they don't fit anywhere we would stick a 10K drive, and is generally stupid if we did"-centric.

With a workload of 4K random writes (worst-case), DWPD is between 0.2 and 0.05. Best-case scenario (100% 128K sequential writes) the DWPD is 0.8.

Scary stuff.

[eldakka]

Other features?

Micron said it has AES 256-bit encryption, TCG Enterprise options, end-to-end data path protection, and power loss protection.

Does it come with the bonus password bypass feature as reported at the el Reg yesterday?

[Magellan]

Enterprise SATA?

Most enterprise storage systems use SAS drive connections. The first 7,200 RPM SATA capacity drives used additional electronic connectors in the drive sled to connect a single-connected SATA drive to a dual connected SAS drive enclosure backplane.

There are some servers, "storage servers" and HCI appliances which used SATA SSDs, but give the use case for these drives will not be transnational workloads (based on the low DWPD), and the likelyhood they would need to be in an all-flash array with inline efficiencies to reduce drive writes, suggests this would have been better served with a SAS interface.

I think there may still be a place for SAS connected SSDs in all-flash arrays for QLC SSDs and high drive count use cases, where cost is more important than maximum performance. It is far less costly to build and scale out hundreds of SAS drives compared to NVMe, which requires more costly electronics and cabling.