Maybe the acquisition of Tidal is playing a part in this. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9711/micron-acquires... . Hold off on releasing an SSD with a controller your don't make yourself so that you can release one with an in house solution?
A Tidal controller might be one of the options Micron is now considering, but I doubt it would have been much of a factor in the decision to cancel. Micron's estimate of how soon a Tidal controller would be ready can't have improved enough over the past two months for them to throw out a mostly-done product. If this decision was about controllers, it is far more likely that Micron decided that the SM2260 wasn't going to be good enough. But I suspect this was more about 3D NAND availability and pricing; Micron may have found themselves in a situation where the TX3 would have to be about as expensive as a Samsung M.2 PCIe SSD regardless of which controller option they used.
Microsoft's storage drivers are more of a constant nuisance than an acute problem that would torpedo a specific product. The performance and feature set may be limited, but even the Windows 7 SP1 NVMe driver actually works for everyday use, and Micron already has a NVMe driver for their enterprise SSDs.
Crucial threw in the towel a long time ago (the MX100 was the last decent drive they made, along with perhaps the accidental hit the BX200 was for the price)
I really don't get this. Micron/Crucial is a U.S. company and I think actually makes their flash here (not 100% sure about that). They also do a lot of testing, and are just less buggy and weird than other companies. I really don't know or care if they're first or third or whatever in speed-all quality SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than mechanical drives, and all slow down massively in random reads/writes. Any differences are going to be imperceptible.
Hell, I use a mechanical drive in one system still, and another for my media and game installs in another system, and mechanical drives-especially when paired with an SSD so they're doing just one or two things at once (like loading a game) aren't that bad.
I'm kind of nervous about new controllers. I've had good luck with Micron's Marvell products, and (in the past) Intel's Intel based products.
Also hope they keep doing MLC drives. Maybe TLC is fine, I don't know, but it makes me nervous. Flash already makes me nervous enough.
At any rate I just bought a new SSD for a single use server of sorts, and got Micron/Crucial's MX200 instead of the 300 as it was only a few dollars more and only 25GB smaller, so I figured I'll try out this new fangled TLC some other day lol.
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dusty5683 - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Maybe the acquisition of Tidal is playing a part in this. http://www.anandtech.com/show/9711/micron-acquires... . Hold off on releasing an SSD with a controller your don't make yourself so that you can release one with an in house solution?Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
A Tidal controller might be one of the options Micron is now considering, but I doubt it would have been much of a factor in the decision to cancel. Micron's estimate of how soon a Tidal controller would be ready can't have improved enough over the past two months for them to throw out a mostly-done product. If this decision was about controllers, it is far more likely that Micron decided that the SM2260 wasn't going to be good enough. But I suspect this was more about 3D NAND availability and pricing; Micron may have found themselves in a situation where the TX3 would have to be about as expensive as a Samsung M.2 PCIe SSD regardless of which controller option they used.Byte - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
I'm thinking they might be having driver problems with NVMe, MS still hasn't had it sorted it yet.Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 18, 2016 - link
Microsoft's storage drivers are more of a constant nuisance than an acute problem that would torpedo a specific product. The performance and feature set may be limited, but even the Windows 7 SP1 NVMe driver actually works for everyday use, and Micron already has a NVMe driver for their enterprise SSDs.Samus - Friday, August 19, 2016 - link
Crucial threw in the towel a long time ago (the MX100 was the last decent drive they made, along with perhaps the accidental hit the BX200 was for the price)...so this is no surprise. Right?
Wolfpup - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
I really don't get this. Micron/Crucial is a U.S. company and I think actually makes their flash here (not 100% sure about that). They also do a lot of testing, and are just less buggy and weird than other companies. I really don't know or care if they're first or third or whatever in speed-all quality SSDs are orders of magnitude faster than mechanical drives, and all slow down massively in random reads/writes. Any differences are going to be imperceptible.Hell, I use a mechanical drive in one system still, and another for my media and game installs in another system, and mechanical drives-especially when paired with an SSD so they're doing just one or two things at once (like loading a game) aren't that bad.
Wolfpup - Monday, August 22, 2016 - link
I'm kind of nervous about new controllers. I've had good luck with Micron's Marvell products, and (in the past) Intel's Intel based products.Also hope they keep doing MLC drives. Maybe TLC is fine, I don't know, but it makes me nervous. Flash already makes me nervous enough.
At any rate I just bought a new SSD for a single use server of sorts, and got Micron/Crucial's MX200 instead of the 300 as it was only a few dollars more and only 25GB smaller, so I figured I'll try out this new fangled TLC some other day lol.