General

Brand	Micron
Model	M500DC
Capacity	240GB
Usage Class	Enterprise

Interface

Host Interface	SATA 6Gb/s
Total Interface Bandwidth	6 Gb/s

Physical Dimension

Form Factor	2.5" 7mm

Flash & Endurance

NAND Flash	20nm MLC
Drive Writes Per Day	2
Total Bytes Written	870 TBW

Performance

Sequential Read	425 MB/s
Sequential Write	375 MB/s
Random Read IOPS	63000
Random Write IOPS	35000
Average Latency	50 μs

Reliability

Mean Time Between Failures	2 Million Hours
Uncorrectable Bit Error Rate	1.0×10⁻¹⁷
Power Loss Protection	Yes

Engineer's Note

The Micron M500DC 240GB (MTFDDAK240MBB) is best suited for read-intensive to mixed enterprise workloads such as boot/cache tiers, CDN edge nodes, and metadata-heavy virtualization, where its 20nm MLC NAND, 2 DWPD endurance, and 870 TBW deliver stronger write tolerance than typical entry SATA SSDs. With up to 425/375 MB/s sequential throughput and 63,000/35,000 IOPS, it provides a well-balanced SATA 6Gb/s profile for latency-sensitive infrastructure that needs predictable performance and enterprise-grade endurance in a compact 240GB footprint.

Endurance & Reliability

With an endurance rating of 870 TBW, the MTFDDAK240MBB can sustain approximately 238 GB of host writes per day over 10 years, which is well above the write volume of a typical OS or boot drive. In practical terms, for standard system-disk and read-heavy application workloads, this level of endurance provides a strong margin for long service life and low wear concern. Its power-loss protection helps preserve in-flight data and mapping information during an unexpected power interruption, reducing the risk of corruption and improving recovery confidence in enterprise environments. An UBER of 1.0E-16 means the drive is designed for a very low uncorrectable bit error rate, supporting high data integrity expectations for business-critical storage.

Technical Specs & Insights

1. The SATA 6Gb/s interface, paired with 425 MB/s sequential read speed, provides a drop-in upgrade for legacy enterprise servers and storage arrays, accelerating boot, restore, and bulk data access without requiring a PCIe platform refresh.
2. With 63,000 K random read IOPS, this drive can sustain responsive performance for metadata-heavy workloads such as virtualization, OLTP databases, and read-intensive caching tiers under concurrent user demand.
3. A 2 DWPD endurance rating makes it well suited for mixed-use enterprise deployments, giving IT teams confidence in handling steady daily overwrite activity across multiple years of service.
4. Built on 20nm MLC NAND, the drive offers a stronger balance of write durability, data retention, and performance consistency than lower-cost consumer-oriented flash, which is critical for always-on business environments.
5. The 50 µs typical latency helps reduce storage wait time at the application layer, improving transaction responsiveness and supporting tighter QoS targets in latency-sensitive enterprise workloads.

Capacity Sweet

Reference capacities in the same series: Lower capacity: 120GB Higher capacity: 480GB Capacity positioning analysis: In this series, the 240GB model sits at the practical sweet spot. Compared with the 120GB version, it gives much better headroom for OS growth, logs, patches, and application overhead, reducing the risk of early capacity pressure in always-on enterprise environments. Compared with the 480GB model, it keeps acquisition cost and fleet-wide budgeting under tighter control while delivering essentially the same enterprise-class sequential and random I/O behavior. It is best suited for mid-scale deployments, such as boot and utility storage for about 40 to 60 virtualization hosts or edge application nodes.

FAQ