Micron rolls out solid-state drives

Memory giant Micron Technology rolled out its lineup of solid-state drives Wednesday.

The move is another data point in a march toward solid state, NAND memory drives. Micron said its drives are designed for PCs, enterprise servers and networking gear. The family of products, dubbed RealSSD, have densities ranging from 1 gigabyte to 64 GBs. Here's a look at the lineup:

• RealSSD drives: Micron is offering 1.8 inch and 2.5 inch drivees for notebooks and desktops. Micron said it is sampling devices and plan to launch mass production in the first quarter. The drives use less than 2 watts of power and are lighter than disk-based hard drives.
• RealSSD Embedded USB: These products offer 1 GB to 8 GBs of storage and are designed to be integrated with the USB 2.0 interface. "This provides a cost-effective solution to store and boot an entire operating system within an industrial PC or blade server system or it could be used as a reserve for often accessed files," says Micron. Mass production is expected by the end of the year.
• RealSSD Module: The Module is a solid state storage device that can be used in many form factors. The modules are less than 4 millimeters thick.

Micron is betting big on solid state drives. In October, Micron Technology CFO Mike Sadler said the company is optimistic about flash memory based solid state drives and sees about 5 million to 10 million units being shipped in 2008. By 2011, Micron is hoping for about 50 million to 60 million units.

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