PCIe 6.0: Micron starts mass production of the first SSD

Micron is starting production of the SSD 9650, the first SSD with PCIe 6.0. This reverses the trend: whereas with previous PCIe versions, motherboards always came first and SSDs later, the Micron 9650 is hitting the market long before the boards.

Micron is promoting the 9650 with quite impressive figures for a first-generation product of a new PCIe generation. The SSD is said to achieve 28 GB/s for reading and 14 GB/s for writing – typically much lower for servers, as such SSDs operate without the SLC cache common in client SSDs. The SSD is also expected to deliver new peak performance for random access, which is significantly more important in the server sector, with 5.5 million IOPS for reading compared to 900,000 IOPS for writing.

The 9650 comes in two form factors, namely the EDSFF variants E1.S and E3.S, and as is usual with Micron, Pro and Max versions are also available. The latter have slightly less storage space because Micron reserves more space in the firmware for overprovisioning, thus promising higher write endurance. Capacities range from 6.4 or 7.68 TB to 25.6 or 30.772 TB, respectively; the endurance of the Max variants is 2.5 times that of the Pro models under random load.

Micron has not yet released any information on exact dates or prices.

PCIe 6.0 still takes time

In the desktop sector, it will still take several years for PCIe 6.0 to become interesting. The CEO of controller manufacturer Silicon Motion, Wallace C. Kou, stated in the summer of 2025 that he could not detect any interest from AMD and Intel.

However, the first computers with PCI Express 6.0 could enter data centers this year. AMD is working on the Epyc cores Zen 6, Intel on the Xeon 7 alias Diamond Rapids. Other hardware is already available: Nvidia's ConnectX-8 SuperNICs, Broadcom's Atlas 3 PEX90144 series PCIe switch chips, and Marvell's Alaska P series PCIe retimer chips already support PCIe 6.0. Diodes also offers switches and retimers for PCIe 6.0. (ll)