Micron: Our firmware update makes 5210 ION SSDs viable alternative to 10K HDDs

Micron has revamped the 5210 ION SSD’s firmware to make it last longer.

Micron said the improved endurance make it a suitable replacement for disk drives in general-purpose servers and storage arrays. The US chipmaker has added a 960GB entry-level model, which is VMware vSAN-certified and claims you should think about ditching 10K rpm disk drives and use the 5210 ION SSD instead.

The 5210 ION SSD was the first quad-level cell (QLC) data centre SSD, when it came to market in May 2018. It had a 6Gbit/s SATA interface and three capacity points: 1.92TB, 3.84TB and 7.68TB. Endurance was a lowly 1,000 write cycles.

Micron has provided detailed endurance numbers by workload and clear performance numbers:

Basically, the higher the random write proportion in a workload the lower the endurance.

The random write IOPS tops out at 13,000 for the 1.92TB version, which is a significant improvement from the 2018-era version’s 4,500 maximum.

Grab a datasheet to find out more.