Micron Prepping MX300 With 3D TLC NAND For April

In addition to launching a new series of enterprise SSDs, Micron has also updated us on their plans for their consumer and OEM client business. While it’s interesting and all to read about enterprise drives, most of you probably won’t need the performance or be able to shell out the big bucks for them. To that end, Micron is planning on a number of releases for their Crucial consumer brand, the big one being the MX300.

With a pedigree that stretches back years from the M4, M500, M550, MX100 and MX200, the MX300 will be the first to utilize TLC. Prior to that, all drives had used the faster and more durable MLC. This won’t be any plain old TLC though as the MX300 will be using Micron’s first 3D TLC NAND. This TLC will come in 384Gbit dies and feature better performance and endurance compared to the planar TLC found in the BX200. No word has been revealed about the controller, but I would expect the Marvell 88SS1074 since that controller is optimized for TLC and the M series have always used Marvell controllers. I would expect the MX300 feature some kind of SLC NAND cache as well.

In addition to the MX300, Micron will also be releasing 2 OEM client SSDs as well. While not targeted to consumers, they still might be available in retail channels. These are the 1100 and 2100 series, both with unknown NAND. We can make some guesses about controllers as one is Marvell M.2 SATA and likely the 88SS1074 and the other is Silicon Motion Industries M.2 PCIe, likely the 2260.

Micron also expected 3D NAND to hit the data center lineups later in the year. There is no timeline yet on when we might see Intel and Micron’s vaunted 3D XPoint. Hopefully, we will be able to bring you some performance numbers for the MX300 once it launches later this month.