Conclusion, Pricing, and Final Thoughts

Conclusion:

Pros:

  • Excellent performance consistency (with TLC NAND to boot!)
  • Low cost/GB (see below)

Cons:

  • Staged rollout means highest capacities unavailable for a few more months
  • TLC endurance may be insufficient for some project requirements

Pricing:

We only have general costs/GB from Micron at this time. I've extrapolated those out into estimated market prices:

  • ECO ($0.45/GB)
    • 480GB   – $216
    • 960GB   – $432
    • 1920GB – $864
    • 3840GB – $1728
    • 7680GB – $3456
  • PRO ($0.52/GB)
    • 240GB   – $125
    • 480GB   – $250
    • 960GB   – $499
    • 1920GB – $998
    • 3840GB – $1997
  • MAX ($0.59/GB)
    • 240GB   – $142
    • 480GB   – $283
    • 960GB   – $566
    • 1920GB – $1133

These are good prices, especially considering the fact that you get 50% more OP in the MAX than in the ECO, yet the cost only increases by 31%.

Warning (to non-IT pros):

If you have read this far and are not an enterprise customer, I know what you're thinking. You may want one of these for your video editing, workstation, or maybe even your gaming rig. That's fine, but there are a few things you need to consider. First, enterprise parts are tuned for random access across the entire drive, meaning a consumer SSD / firmware would likely perform better with consumer workloads as it is tuned for that purpose. Second, and more importantly, many enterprise SSDs are designed to self-brick in the case of unexpected corruption. This is because IT specialists don't like wasting time on intermittent faults and silent data corruption. If something is wrong in the slightest, an IT Pro just wants the thing to fail hard so they can replace it and get that portion of their network back up ASAP. Consumer SSD firmwares will push through many faults and attempt to continue operating while those same issues would otherwise render an enterprise inoperable (and most likely unrecoverable). Moral of the story – don't use an enterprise part for consumer purposes unless you are employing an enterprise-level redundancy / backup regime.

Final Thoughts:

Micron has followed through on their promise to deliver a SATA SSD that checks all of the enterprise use boxes. Every reasonable capacity point is (or will shortly) be addressed across three product lines ranging from read-centric to heavy writes. Performance consistency not only exceeded Micron's specification, it exceeded my own expectations! The fact that all of this was accomplished with pure eTLC NAND speaks volumes to both Micron's firmware tuning capability and IMFT's 3D NAND performance. If you're considering that next big upgrade to a segment of your data center, I'd suggest giving the Micron 5100 a strong look.

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