Micron Technology has launched a new line of solid state drives.
The NAND flash-based drives are designed to replace the hard disks used in laptops, personal computers and some servers.
The announcement was made at an event for industry analysts in California.
Solid state drives are Micron’s first foray into the hard disk market. Micron’s offering, called RealSSD, comes in a variety of capacities and, according to the company, offers advantages over current hard disk drives – including lower power, faster boot-up time, increased reliability, improved performance and reduced noise.
Micron unveiled two solid state drives, with 32 or 64 gigabyte capacities, designed to replace drives used in notebooks and desktop PCs; an embedded USB drive offering up to 8 gigabytes of storage; and a module drive for enterprise servers.
Frankie Roohparvar, Micron’s vice president of NAND development, told analysts at the event (which was also broadcast on the Web) that the market for NAND storage is continuing to grow. Laptop manufacturers are one of the core markets Micron will target, because notebook computers depend on reliable storage that can run off a battery.
Unlike a hard disk, flash memory has no moving parts.
Although Micron was not first to the market, Klein said the company has a good position in the industry because it can control the supply of NAND flash memory.