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Micron RealSSD P320h PCI Express SSD Review

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News Posted: Mon, Oct 15 2012 2:38 PM
Most of the PCIe SSD cards on the market today, with the exception of products from Fusion-io, still rely on SATA or SAS-based NAND controllers to interface on the backend of the device to the NAND array. PCIe cards from OCZ, Intel, LSI and others use controllers from LSI SandForce or the like.  Fusion-io was the first company to introduce a true native PCI Express to NAND processor employed in their products, though Micron has also been cooking up their own native PCIe SSD technology for some time now.

Today we're looking at the Micron P320h, a PCI Express SSD that was introduced to the market well over a year ago and has actually been shipping to OEM customers for some time, but is just now hitting the market for general availability.  Micron partnered with IDT, a veteran semiconductor manufacturer out of San Jose that specializes in high speed serial switching and memory interface technology.  A match made in high bandwidth heaven, between a bellwether memory giant and a cutting-edge high speed logic manufacturer?  Perhaps.  Read on as we find out.

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4L1G8R replied on Mon, Oct 15 2012 4:04 PM

That's the first time I've seen a 670 used for memory in a test system. Stick out tongue

Or 16 GB of integrated audio memory either....lol

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Dave_HH replied on Mon, Oct 15 2012 4:32 PM

Not sure I follow there, 4L1. The systems specs don't list that gibberish from what I can see.

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speculatrix replied on Tue, Oct 16 2012 5:47 AM

@4L1G8R

I think you are simply seeing a mis-rendering of the specification table with one side shifted down by a row.

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Dave_HH replied on Tue, Oct 16 2012 1:51 PM

Is it? I'm not seeing it that way in any browser? Which browser renders it this way?

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jingles replied on Wed, Oct 17 2012 1:59 AM

Pretty amazing to see a THREE year old Fusion-io card still killing the numbers and performing as advertised. I take it you have no recent products you could have used in this comparison test?

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Dave_HH replied on Wed, Oct 17 2012 8:27 AM

That is correct. Fusion-io has a great product, no doubt but we have yet to receive their ioDrive 2.

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ATSP replied on Wed, Oct 17 2012 4:47 PM

Dave,

P320h is AHCI based, not NVMe.

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Dave_HH replied on Wed, Oct 17 2012 11:00 PM

Micron has been pretty tight-lipped about the specifics of their ASIC but I didn't say it was either, just that IDT has a family of chips that are similar to the Micron ASIC, and those are NVMe.

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boogerlad replied on Sat, Jan 12 2013 6:22 PM

Dave, can you show us a video of the p320h booting up? I'm sorry to revive this very old comment thread, but I've been looking for native bootable pci-e ssds for a while now.

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Dave_HH replied on Wed, Jan 16 2013 7:26 AM

boogerlad:

Dave, can you show us a video of the p320h booting up? I'm sorry to revive this very old comment thread, but I've been looking for native bootable pci-e ssds for a while now.

Hi BL, It's never a problem reviving a thread when you have relevant questions like this or even if you just want to comment. Smile

The reason I didn't cover boot-up with the P320h is that technically, Micron doesn't support this out of the box and I was unable to get it to function stably.  I did try and even got an image installed on it but it blue screened pretty quickly.  I could revisit it with newer drivers I suppose but it's unlikely to be different I think. 

Micron is heavily invested in supporting server configurations with this product and not as focused on it as a desktop solution.

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