Micron Technology today launched the Micron 5200 series of SATA solid state drives (SSDs), maintaining performance, consistency, capacity and overall infrastructure value.

Built on Micron's new 64-layer 3D NAND technology, the Micron 5200 series of SSDs has been designed to offer a cost-optimized SATA platform for business-critical virtualized workloads that cripple on a hard drive.

Unlike the 5100 series, the 5200 series won't be available in the M.2 form factor. Instead, the 5100 series will continue to service the M.2 market and the low capacity 2.5" market until 2019.

The company has made the firmware changes to support the new 3D NAND and they have made some minor tweaks to improve performance consistency, but otherwise the 5200 uses the same basic firmware architecture as the 5100.

Where the previous 5100 series included three tiers of write endurance and overprovisioning - ECO, PRO and MAX - the 5200 only includes the ECO and PRO tiers, and the PRO tier has been pared down to just two capacities.

The Micron 5200 SSDs deliver efficient QoS, offering up to 99.7 percent better QoS when compared to a mission-critical hard disk drive.

Engineered for fast random IO performance that fuels virtualized applications, Micron 5200 SSDs deliver up to 95k IOPS random reads and 33,000 random writes. The drive is also flexible, as data center managers can use the Flex Capacity feature to adjust the drive's endurance, performance, and capacity.

In addition, Micron 5200 SSD data sheet specifications offer a mean time to failure (MTTF) of 3 million device hours.

The new SSDs are available now.