Micron Technology Inc., a leader in semiconductor manufacturing, has announced that its 232-layer QLC NAND flash memory is now in mass production. This cutting-edge technology is being shipped to enterprise storage customers and sampled to original equipment PC manufacturers. The 232-layer QLC NAND offers improved performance for mobile, client, edge, and data center storage use cases. It is more compact, allowing for thinner and lighter devices, and has a higher bit-density with NAND I/O speeds of 2400 MT/s, a 50% improvement over the previous generation. Additionally, it offers better read and programming performance.
One of the products that integrates the 232-layer QLC NAND is the Micron 2500 Client SSD. This SSD aims to enhance everyday computing and improve the PC user experience. It has demonstrated superior PCMark 10 experience benchmark results, outperforming average scores in the SSD segment. As the industry transitions to QLC-based storage, Micron expects the 2500 SSD to accelerate QLC adoption in PCs due to its superior user experience and value proposition.
The Micron 2500 SSD boasts up to 7.1 GB/s sequential read speeds, surpassing TLC-based NAND and QLC-based NAND SSDs in the segment. The accelerated caching feature enables faster read and write performance under various applications. Even the smaller capacity 512GB SSD equipped with the 232-layer QLC NAND has endurance to support 13 4K movie downloads per day for three years.
Available in capacities ranging from 512GB up to 2TB, and in form factors including 22 x