Crucial revealed today that the TX3 NVMe SSD, their first high performance gaming SSD due to be sold under the newly independent Ballistix Gaming brand, has been cancelled. The drive, which had been announced during Computex2016 alongside the MX300, was to be their first entrant into high-speed NVMe storage designed for and marketed towards the gaming consumer segment.
"Based on prioritization of company resources and investments, the Ballistix TX3 PCIe NVMe SSD program has been cancelled. We are, however, continuing to explore potential opportunities for future gaming products and will provide an update as new plans are formalized."
- Official statement from Crucial.
- Official statement from Crucial.
Lack of high speed storage options beyond the limitations of the SATA III protocol has been an ongoing weakness for the memory giant, who continue to have a strong position in the mainstream consumer market through their performance and value-oriented 2.5" drives. The TX3 was to utilise the emerging M.2 form factor, Micron's 2-cell MLC 3D NAND and leverage Silicon Motion's SM2260 controller, potentially hitting read rates of around 2.2GB/s and write rates roughly half that.
High-speed consumer-grade PCI-Express Storage is a market currently dominated by Samsung and Intel with additional strong showings from Plextor and OCZ/Toshiba. Competition in this space will only get more intense as Samsung, Intel et al release new generations of drives, so it's possible that Crucial felt they were already too far behind to make effective inroads into the market. Furthermore the new U.2 interconnect for SSDs, present only on a tiny number of NVMe drives thus far, could prove to be a destabilising factor.
It's not clear what, if any, impact this will have on the Micron 2100, a drive for the Enterprise market with similar component hardware.
