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Micron Technology recently announced that it will ship a series of solid-state drives next quarter ranging up to 256 gigabytes in capacity, but at one-third the price per gigabyte of existing drives.

Micron's RealSSD-branded products are targeted at both the corporate enterprise and laptop markets--the latter drives priced significantly lower. The Boise, Idaho-based memory chip manufacturer's entry into the high-capacity SSD market presages Intel's launch of a line of SSDs later this year. Intel and Micron have a partnership to jointly manufacture flash memory.

The P200 enterprise drives use single-level cell (SLC) technology, while the less expensive C200 consumer drives are based on multi-level cell (MLC). MLC allows drive makers to build larger capacity drives at lower cost but is not as fast as SLC nor inherently as reliable. Though SLC solid-state drives are used currently in laptops such as the Apple MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300, in most cases they will be replaced by MLC drives in future laptop models.

Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-10005541-64.html?hhTest=1