Micron has new SSDs on the market using its newest NAND process technology. Specifically, the new Micron 7450 series continues Micron’s vision of offering an expansive set of form factors on a common platform and combines that with its 176-Layer NAND and performance focus.
Micron 7450 SSDs Launched with 176-Layer NAND
One of the hallmarks of Micron’s latest series, including the Micron 7400 series that we took a look at here is that it has been building families of SSDs across broad sets of form factors. One can get similar features, albeit with different performance and capacities, across U.3, E1.S, and M.2 form factors.
Powering the new drives is Micron’s 176-layer TLC NAND. This new NAND places the CMOS area under the stack instead of next to it making it more efficient.
The new NAND also has a shorter program time helping performance and also lowering power consumption since the program operations tend to consume significant power.
Sequential read speeds are generally around 6.8GB/s as this is a PCIe Gen4 family of SSDs. Write speeds vary wildly as they can be as low as 0.7-1.4GB/s for the sub 1TB drives and up to 5.6GB/s for the higher-speed drives. We are certainly in the era where sub 1TB drives are not the performance optimization points anymore.
Between the Micron 7450 Pro (1 DWPD) and 7450 MAX (3 DWPD) drives, we get capacities of 400GB to 12.8TB and spanning many different form factors.
Final Words
We are excited to see Micron’s new direction here as having one set of features for encryption, PLP, and so forth in a line of drives spanning M.2, E1.S, and E.3 is unique. It allows a company to validate firmware and features and then deploy drives across different types of server and storage machines.
Also, and perhaps as importantly, it was less than five months ago that we had the Micron 7400 series release, so it seems like the company is also increasing its cadence of new drive releases which is a good sign.
