March 2012 - We recently had a chance to test the Micron 200GB P400e Enterprise class SSD. This MLC drive is optimized and designed for the enterprise marketplace. The drive features a high performance read channel that is about double the throughput of the write channel. In most enterprise applications, the SSD is part of a tiered storage solution, and has a different use model from the consumer drives which are single drive centric solutions.
Micron P400e Enterprise SSD
The drive features a standard SATAIII (6Gbps) interface and is a 2.5" form factor product. As the device is targeted for the enterprise marketplace, rather than consumer, the drive kit does not include accessory mounting brackets or such as are found in retail kits. The drive has 256GB of raw capacity and a user accessible capacity of 200GB and currently uses Micron 25nm NAND Flash for the product and a Marvell controller IC.
The drive performed particularly well on random reads in the several benchmarks run as well as applications such as Office application and presentation creation. For large data files, such as used for videos and video editing archive, the write performance with the 6Gbps interface and the MLC core was on a par with the performance from a 3Gbps SLC enterprise drive. However, the read for the large sequential files was much faster. This would make this a very good intermediate storage product, in a tiered solution, for those in the media management industries.
The drive worked well with both 512 and 4K sector data being copied from existing HDD drives, so compatibility with AF is not an issue. The device has close to 2.5ms access time for a write on both sequential and large blocks, and a 0.5ms access time for read. This made web page access and reference data recall nearly instantaneous by the end user. In the enterprise use model, it is not huge IOP performance that drive the use, it is reliability. The device has a fair amount of over-partitioning so wear leveling over the life of the drive should not be a factor.
All in all a very stable drive for the enterprise marketplace, and other high reliability applications. The drive did not exhibit any extreme temperature behaviour, the drive remained cool to the touch in the entire scope of testing.
