After sticking with 2D NAND for quite a while, Crucial and parent company Micron finally moved to 3D NAND with the MX300. After releasing the drive earlier in the Summer, Crucial followed up with a wider range of capacities reaching up to 1TB maximum. According to an accidental Amazon product posting, it looks like Crucial preparing yet another higher capacity release with a new 2TB model.
Just a few years ago, these large capacities would have been unthinkable for a SSD. With the advent of 3D NAND and TLC, SSDs have come close to striking distance of many consumer hard disk drives. Utilizing the new 32-layer 3D with three-bits per cell memory, this allows for high-density 384Gbit dies which allows the drives to pack much more storage within the same space. This continues the trend of pushing the capacity limits rather than performance.
For pricing, the 2TB MX 300 will cost you a cool $549.99. While it might seem pricey, it’s quite a deal compared to the past and shows off how much SSD prices have dropped recently. Hopefully, we’ll see more price drops for SSDs going forward but we may be running into the limits of die shrinking. Crucial expects pre-order availability for the MX300 to start later today and shipments to start mid September.
