Micron presents the first PCIe 6.0 SSD, 245-TByte SSD to follow
The Micron 9650 comes for servers with PCI Express 6.0. The 6600 Ion series appears with particularly high capacity.
All three announced Micron SSDs side by side. There are other versions in different designs.
(Image: Micron)
Micron is the first manufacturer to present a finished SSD with PCI Express 6.0. The Micron 9650 in the E1.S and E3.S designs is intended for servers where high read performance is important. The SSD achieves 28 GByte/s sequentially, and the manufacturer also claims up to 5.5 million input/output operations per second (IOPS) for random access –, in each case reading.
The manufacturer relies on a self-designed controller in combination with its NAND flash components. The latter store three bits per cell (Triple Level Cells, TLC). On paper, this combination lags what Silicon Motion has specified for its own SM8466 controller: It is said to achieve up to seven million IOPS with fast memory.
Writing significantly slower
The 9650 series is available in Pro and Max versions with capacities of up to 30.72 and 25.6 TByte respectively. The write performance is significantly lower than the read performance for all of them. All types achieve 14 GByte/s sequentially. Depending on capacity, the Pro versions achieve 500,000 to 570,000 IOPS write; the Max 900,000.
All variants consume up to 25 watts of electrical power. Compared to PC SSDs, this is a lot – but for servers this is still a normal value. Micron speaks of up to 67 percent higher energy efficiency for random read accesses compared to PCIe 5.0 SSDs.
Micron does not comment on availability. Initially, the 9650 SSDs are probably intended for validation with next-gen servers. PCIe 6.0-capable server processors are not expected until 2026.
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245 TByte coming in 2026
Meanwhile, the newly announced 6600 Ion SSD series is designed for maximum capacity. The first variants for this year will appear with up to 122 TByte in the E3.S and U.2 designs, followed by versions with 245 TByte capacity in the first half of 2026. Micron is thus following in the footsteps of its competitor Kioxia, which recently announced a 245 TByte SSD itself.
In terms of performance, Micron is taking a step back compared to the 9650: The 6600 Ion SSDs have to make do with PCIe 5.0 and therefore up to 14 GByte/s read and 3 GByte/s write. The manufacturer puts the IOPS of the largest models at two million read and only 40,000 write.
To achieve this capacity, Micron relies on its own QLC memory. It stores four bits per cell (Quadruple Level Cells), which explains the low write performance.
The 7600 SSD series with capacities of up to 15.36 TByte rounds off Micron's trio of announcements. It is intended to be a cheaper alternative with a lower PCIe 5.0 speed.
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