Micron's consumer brand, Crucial Memory, has been putting extra focus on the SSD market over the last few quarters. The brand was marketing entry-level QLC drives in the 2018 - 2022 time frame. Recently, emphasis has also been placed on cutting-edge SSDs - both internal (such as the Gen4 T500 and Gen5 T700) and external (such as the X10 Pro). Vertical integration, coupled with Micron being the first flash manufacturer to achieve volume production of 200+ layer 3D NAND, has been crucial to Crucial's success in these segments.
At the 2024 CES, Micron had a couple of interesting USB4 SSD technology demonstrations for its resellers / partners and invited media. These are essentially products under development (with no guarantees that they would make it to the market in their current form). Both products are bridge-based solutions using the ASMedia ASM2464PD USB4 to NVMe accessory controller. The key update over the popular ASM2364 (USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 upstream, and PCIe 3.0 x4 downstream) is the shift to a 40 Gbps USB4 upstream port along with a PCIe 4.0 x4 link downstream. The power delivery component of the Type-C specification is also implemented within the controller.
