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After an exceptionally busy end of year work load we have been able to get a belated look at the Micron M600 Solid State Drive. Today we put it through its paces against many other leading drives on the market this year. The Micron M600 family spans multiple form factors in sizes between 128GB and 1TB, however for our article we are focusing on the 2.5 inch 256GB drive.
The M600 uses Micron's newest 16nm NAND which will reduce production costs, and subsequently lower prices to the punter. Micron have earned a reputation as Intel's partner in the joint NAND flash project, called IMFT. They may not have an immediately recognisable name in the enthusiast sector, but Micron tend to focus on OEM and enterprise products. The consumer products are marketed under the brands Crucial Technology and Lexar.
The M600 drive is equipped with dynamic write acceleration. This is designed to deliver lower power consumption, lower write amplification and higher levels of performance. While we are reviewing the standard 2.5 inch drive today, there are mSATA and M.2 devices also available. Additionally, Micron offer self encrypting and non self encrypting versions.
Micron claim that the drives will deliver up to 560 MB/s sequential read and up to 510 MB/s sequential write speeds. The 128GB version however suffers a little due to the layout configuration – peaking at 400 MB/s write. IOPS performance for all drives is certainly commendable, with rated figures quoted between 90k and 100k (read) and 88k (write).
The Micron M600 box artwork is certainly simple. Its a blue and white two tone affair, with the company and product name clearly listed on the front.
No style awards for the Micron M600. It is a simple black aluminum brushed case with a specifications and info sticker on one side. Interesting to see the chassis is tool less and can be snapped open, although it is rather tricky to do this without causing some surface damage to the chassis. Fortunately you have us to do the hard work for you.
The 256GB PCB front and back – protected behind a cover on one side and a thermal pad on the other side of the chassis. There are eight NAND packages on the PCB, with a single DRAM chip. Above the DRAM chip is a protection circuit to save DATA in case of a power failure. The other side of the PCB is almost completely naked.
The M600 uses the Marvell 8 channel 88SS9189-BLD2 controller. This is the controller that Crucial use in their MX100 drives. Adaptive thermal monitoring is supported.
When the drive is freshly formatted in Windows, there is 238GB free – shown above. On this page we present some high resolution images of the product in our studio with a Nikon D810 and Sigma 50mm f1.4 art lens. These will take much longer to open due to the dimensions, especially on slower connections. If you use these pictures on another site or publication, please credit Kitguru.net as the owner/source. You can right click and ‘save as’ to your computer to view later.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
Kitguru Test Rig 3
Other Drives
Apotop S3C 256GB
Angelbird 512GB wrk
Hynix SH920/910A
OCZ ARC 100 240GB
OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB
OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB
Intel 520 Series 240GB
Intel 730 240GB
Samsung 840 EVO 1TB
OCZ Vector 150 256GB
OCZ Vector 240GB
OCZ Vertex 450 256GB
OCZ Vertex 4 512GB
OCZ Vertex 4 128GB (1.4 fw)
ADATA Premier Pro SP900 128GB
Intel 730 240GB
OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid 1TB HDD/SDD
SanDisk Extreme II 240GB
Corsair Performance Pro 256GB
OCZ Agility 4 256GB
SanDisk Ultra Plus 256GB
Samsung 830 Series 512GB
Patriot Wildfire 240GB
OCZ Vertex 3 240GB MAX IOPS
ADATA S510 120GB
Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB
OCZ Octane 512GB (fw 1.13)
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark.
CrystalMark 3.0.3.
AS SSD.
IOMeter.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3.
Overall performance is strong, with sequential read speeds hitting around 500 MB/s. 4K QD32 results are also excellent.
This drive handles compressible and incompressible data equally well, which will help in specific situations, such as when dealing with large video files and images.
Above, some included compares from other leading solid state drives which we have reviewed.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
Read and write performance is excellent peaking at 560 MB/s read and 510 MB/s write. While write performance could be a little higher, the read performance is saturating the real world limitations of the SATA 3 interface.
Some comparison results from other leading products available on the market today.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
AS SSD deals exclusively with incompressible data and the results from the Micron M600 drive are excellent – the overall score of 1,000 is high. The Marvell controller doesn't exhibit weaknesses when shifting between compressible and incompressible data streams.
Some other comparisons from leading manufacturer drives, which we have tested in recent months.
IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology.
We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will often vary between the manufacturer’s quoted ratings.
IOPS performance is excellent, outperforming some of the leading drives we have tested in recent months, such as the Angelbird 512GB wrk.
The Micron M600 256GB drive performs very well in all situations and will fit into a variety of builds, including a workstation environment which requires balanced throughput across both compressible and incompressible data streams.
The Micron M600 in reality doesn't offer much to the enthusiast user to make it stand out in such a massively saturated marketplace. The drive itself may look rather plain on first glance, but we like how the company allow it to be snapped open without the need for a tool kit. The majority of users may never need to look inside, but it could prove useful for some.
On a performance level, the Micron M600 doesn't fail to deliver, but we already know the Marvell 8 channel controller is bulletproof – we have seen it used in quite a few drives within recent months.
IOPS performance rates as well above average, our tests show stable 4k random performance rating around the 80,000 mark. We couldn't quite hit the 100,000 figure that Micron claim, but it is possible they adopt a different methodology to achieve the results.
The biggest issue the Micron M600 faces is UK availability. All of the major online retailers we tried have no stock of this drive. Even the giant Amazon are listing ‘currently unavailable'. A webstore called yesinfotech show stock at £152 inc vat, but we know nothing about this retailer and would advise caution. With Samsung's 850 Pro 256GB drive available for less (only £150 at Amazon) it seems Micron are fighting a losing battle in the UK.
In closing, there is no doubt the Micron M600 is a very capable drive, powered by the reliable Marvell 8 channel 88SS9189-BLD2 controller – however availability issues and market saturation do little to help drive forward market adoption. If you can find it, its worth considering, just be sure not to pay over the odds as some small UK retailers have it listed at close to £190 inc vat – in today's market this is just not competitive at all.
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Pros:
- Marvell 8 channel 88SS9189-BLD2 controller is excellent.
- strong IOPS performance.
- sequential read speeds saturate the SATA 3 interface.
Cons:
- intense competition.
- poor availability in UK.
- Samsung 850 Pro is cheaper and widely available.
Kitguru says: The Micron M600 is a great performer, but poor UK availability and stiff competition mean you are likely to end up buying another product entirely.
