Crucial has just announced the new M550 series of performance SSDs, available in 2.5-inch SATA, mSATA, and M.2 form-factors. The successor of the existing M500 series offers higher sequential transfer rates and also comes in higher capacities while keeping the price-points near of those ot its predecessor.

The mSATA 6 Gb/s and M.2 models come in capacities of 128 GB, 256 GB, and 512 GB; while the 2.5-inch SATA 6 Gb/s models include 1 TB capacity.

Based on a Marvel controller and Micron-made 20nm MLC NAND flash, the drives offer sequential reads as high as 550 MB/s, with up to 500 MB/s of sequential writes.

The new series also introduces a handful of features, such as the Native Write Acceleration, RAIN technology, Adaptive Thermal Protection, hardware-based encryption, and Micron's data integrity algorithm.

They new SSDs are backed by 3-year warranties. Prices for the 2.5-inch models are the following:

Features M550 2.5-Inch SATA NAND Flash SSD

• Micron 20nm MLC NAND Flash
• SATA 6 Gb/s interface
• TCG/Opal 2.0-compliant self-encrypting drive
(SED)
• Compatible with Microsoft eDrive
• Hardware-based AES-256 encryption engine
• Industry-standard, 512-byte sector size support
• Hot-plug/hot-remove capable
• Device sleep (DEVSLP), extreme low-power mode
• Native command queuing support with 32-command
slot support
• ATA-8 ACS2 command set compliant
• ATA security feature command set and password
login support
• Secure erase (data page) command set: fast and secure
erase
• Sanitize device feature set support
• Self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology
(SMART) command set
• Adaptive thermal monitoring
• Power loss protection for data-at-rest

• Performance

• PCMark Vantage (HDD test suite score): Up to
  90,000
• Sequential 128KB READ: Up to 550 MB/s
• Sequential 128KB WRITE: Up to 500 MB/s
• Random 4KB READ: Up to 95,000 IOPS
• Random 4KB WRITE: Up to 85,000 IOPS
• READ/WRITE latency: 5ms/25ms (MAX)

• MTTF: 1.5 million device hours
• Static and dynamic wear leveling
• Uncorrectable bit error rate (UBER): <1 sector
  per 1015 bits read