Micron announced that its 232-layer QLC NAND is now being shipped to select Crucial SSDs, volume production to enterprise storage customers, and sampling to OEM PC manufacturers.

Micron 232-layer QLC NAND offers enhanced performance across various storage applications, thanks to these essential capabilities:

• Industry-leading bit density, up to 28% more compact than leading competitors’ latest products
• Industry-leading NAND I/O speeds of 2,400 MT/s, a 50% improvement over the prior generation
• 24% better read performance over the prior-gen
• 31% better programming performance over the prior-gen

Bill Cerreta, GM, Hyperscale, Pure Storage, Inc., said that Micron’s 232-layer QLC NAND is a key enabler of their high-capacity storage solution. He said that thanks to Micron’s NAND innovation, Pure Storage can take another step towards replacing all HDDs in data centers by 2028.

With its best-in-class performance, the 2500 raises the bar for everyday computing and greatly improves the PC user experience. The company is the first to ship QLC-based client NVMe SSDs with the highest NAND layer count for the second generation in a row. Being the first consumer SSD in the world to incorporate 200+ layer QLC NAND, the SSD is unique.

The 2500 SSD not only sets a new bar for storage productivity in everyday PC applications and computing workloads, but it also offers a user experience that outperforms competitor TLC- and QLC-based SSDs. With a score advantage of up to 45%, the SSD outperformed comparable QLC and TLC SSDs in the same price range in the PCMark 10 benchmark test.

With remarkable sequential read rates of up to 7.1 GB/s, the Micron 2500 SSD is groundbreaking as the first QLC SSD to attain nearly the maximum performance of PCIe Gen 4. It performs better than competing products in the value market compared to TLC- and QLC-based NAND SSDs.