Micron Technology, Inc., today announced the next step towards market leadership for its quad-level cell (QLC) NAND technology with immediate broad market availability of the popular Micron 5210 ION enterprise SATA SSD, the world’s first QLC SSD, which began shipping to select customers and partners in May of this year. Available through global distributors, the Micron 5210 ION enterprise SATA SSD further accelerates Micron’s lead in the QLC market, enabling replacement of hard disk drives (HDDs) with SSDs and building on Micron’s recent launch of the Crucial P1 NVMe QLC SSD for consumer markets.
Micron QLC SSDs Hit The Market
Enterprise storage needs are increasing as data center applications deliver real-time user insights and intelligent and enhanced user experiences, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, big data and real-time analytics. At the same time, there is a growing consumer need for higher storage capacity to support digital experiences. QLC SSDs are uniquely designed to address these requirements.
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“Since launching the world’s first QLC SSD and now making it available broadly to the market, Micron is enabling the rapid shift from slow, power-hungry HDDs to solid state drives, QLC technology will become ubiquitous as today’s enterprise and consumer segments start reaping the inherent advantages of SSDs over HDDs, now delivered at similar price points offered by HDDs.”
Derek Dicker, Micron’s corporate vice president and general manager of the Storage Business Unit.
High-density Micron QLC 64-layer 3D NAND flash media achieves densities of one terabit on a single chip, enabled by next-generation cell architecture, and offers an attractive option to AI and machine learning professionals. Providing the ease of SATA with the economics and speed of QLC NAND, the Micron 5210 ION SSD has already hastened the speed at which AI learns.
“By switching to QLC SSDs from hard disk drives, our machine learning workloads complete eight times faster for TensorFlow processing, TFRecord creation, ingest and image classification. We found that a 2.3TB, 100,000 image dataset took 15.17 hours on our HDD platform while the Micron 5210 ION completed the same task in just 1.87 hours, resulting in 13 hours of savings on an everyday task. The more machine learning you do and the bigger your dataset, the more your time savings will compound.”
Gautam Shah, CEO of Colfax International, a leading machine learning solution provider
Though QLC write endurance would be likely worse than TLC NAND or the HDDs they plan on replacing the lower cost and higher speeds could be a benefit for those who need the speed over longevity.
Availability
The Micron 5210 ION SSD is now in mass production and immediately available through leading global distributors, resellers and system builders. Currently only CDW is offering Preorders.
