Flash memory chips are often likened to the pork bellies of the semiconductor trade and seen as commodity products expected to be essential far into the future as computing needs continue to explode. As such, they are products often ignored, as investors and the media focus heavily on GPUs and faster CPUs to build AI robots and cars and to crank up cloud data centers.
Because they are such a commodity, chip investors and especially average PC and laptop users often overlook the role played by the enclosed solid state drive’s power, size or performance. Even so, several major chipmakers are battling around the clock to improve the metrics behind SSDs with various innovations.
One of the memory chip leaders, Micron, on Tuesday announced it is shipping its latest creation, the Micron 2550 NVMe SSD, to companies that make mainstream laptops and desktops. The big achievement: it is the world’s first client SSD to ship using NAND at over 200 layers. Along with 232-layer NAND, it is built on Micron’s PCIe Gen4 architecture, already broadly used by the industry.
Shipments of the 2550 come at a critical time for Micron as the company recently announced both massive long-term manufacturing expansion plans in the US, then surprised investors on Nov. 16 with short-term plans to shrink its DRAM and NAND supplies by 20%.
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Against the backdrop of market upheaval, Praveen Vaidyanathan, general manager of Micron’s client storage group, boasted the 2550 will deliver “impressive application performance and phenomenal power savings.” The company in July had already promoted the 232-layer NAND and is now further along in the production stage.
Greg Wong, principal analysts at Forward Insights, said leading Gen4 SSDs, including the 2550, will improve user experiences and continue to attract the attention of laptop and PC makers into 2026. With 232-layer NAND, Micron is pumping out an SSD with the most advanced technology which means Micron is “probably at least six months ahead of others,” he told Fierce Electronics.
Six months. That’s comparable to a decade for most other industries, but Micron is in a race with Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, both of South Korea, as well as Western Digital, which formalized a joint investment in April with Kioxia to invest in a new flash memory fab in Japan.
SK Hinex is working on a 238-layer client SSD, while Samsung is developing a 236-layer SSD, Wong said. “It’s not clear whether SK Hynix has pushed out their plans for 238 due to capex cuts they’ve made,” he said. “In the past, Samsung has been the leader, but with 176-layer, Micron leapfrogged them and the rest of the industry to take the lead. And Micron continues their lead with 232 layer. Samsung is trying to catch up.”
Broadly speaking, engineering 3D NAND generally involves placing layer after layer of alternating polysilicon and silicon dioxide atop each other with a changeover to charge trap flash instead of floating gate.
While Micron didn’t name its competitors to the new 2550, it claimed the SSD transfers files 112% faster and loads major games up to 57% faster than comparable competing products. Not to brag too much, Micron said its 2550 also delivers “breakneck” sequential read performance of up to 5 gigabytes per second and sequential write performance of up to 4 gigabytes per second, which are 43% and 33% faster than the previous SSD generation, respectively.
The bigger concern to average users may be power savings, although it is up to PC makers to decide how to divvy up power savings for a more brilliant laptop display, for instance, or just longer overall battery life. Micron said it is using an advanced process node for the controller and elimination of DRAM by way of Host Memory Buffer technology. Sleep power consumption in the 2550 is under 2.5 milliwatts, while active idle power consumption is under 150 milliwatts and active power consumption is below 5.5 watts.
Micron made its SSD in three sizes with the largest at 22 x 80mm, and three capacities with the largest at 1 TB.