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.
micron = elpida =
micron = elpida = ????
samsung still the best for memory.
Elpida was acquired by Micron
Elpida was acquired by Micron recently.
FYI,
“Read on for our full
FYI,
“Read on for our full review of the Micron 5100 MAX 960GB and 5100 ECO 1920GB Enterprise SATA SSDs!” link goes to a different article.
Whoops! I fixed it for Allyn.
Whoops! I fixed it for Allyn.
These seem to be quite
These seem to be quite capable drives, but in Crucial/Micron and Intel’s consumer and prosumer drives there has been some degradation in terms of durability and performance.
I think both Intel and Crucial/Micron should have continued to sell their 16nm 2D MLC parts like their MX200 series, which is actually better than their MX300. The 600 series from Intel also sucks and this trend is going to push people like me from the MX200 class drives into enterprise drives because i actually want SOME overprovisioning and quality.
N-RAM and STT-MRAM cant replace consumer grade NAND fast enough for me.
am i wrong or are these iops
am i wrong or are these iops numbers, terrible??
What kind of shit review is
What kind of shit review is this where the graphs don’t have any other drives for comparison? These numbers are completely arbitrary based on different testing conditions unless you give other drives for comparison.
“completely arbitrary based
“completely arbitrary based on different testing conditions”
Good thing in their methodology they try to keep the testing conditions completely the same you so can see how the drive performs compared to it’s rated specs. Enterprise devices aren’t judged by “What is best?” but rather “What is best for us?”. A slight distinction, but important none the less.
A certain other website used
A certain other website used to be the top dog of AllTime on enterprise hardware reviews, but if PCPer and Allyn keep up this kind of work AnoTher website might see some pageviews stolen!