Micron has refreshed its industrial storage portfolio with two major additions, offering a choice between high speed and high capacity. Featuring the latest PCIe 6.0 interface and 9th-gen 276-layer 3D NAND, the 9650 SSDs are set to be the best solutions yet for servers and data centres.
Announced as the world’s first PCIe 6.0 data centre SSD, it delivers double the performance of previous solutions. Aimed at the most demanding workloads that require extreme sequential and random read speeds, Micron expects this model to reach up to 28GB/s in sequential read and 14GB/s in sequential write, making it nearly two times faster than the best Gen 5 SSDs.
As a reminder, PCIe 6.0 SSDs have access to a theoretical interface bandwidth of up to 32GB/s, twice that available to PCIe 5.0 drives. In other words, Micron is already quite close to the limit of PCIe 6.0 x4 from the get-go, especially considering that the theoretical limit is unreachable due to the transmission/protocol overheads. That said, the drive is meant to communicate in peer-to-peer with Nvidia’s Blackwell GPUs without CPU intervention, which may unlock more performance.
But that’s not all. Micron also advertises outstanding IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) on the 9650, claiming up to 5.5 million in read and 0.9 million in write. For comparison, consumer Gen 5 SSDs such as the Samsung 9100 Pro hover around the 2 million range. Thanks to its performance, the 9650 will primarily target AI servers, available in the E1.S (9.5mm or 15mm) and E3.S 1T form factors. A liquid-cooled E1.S version will also be available for the most advanced AI data centres.
In addition to the 9650, Micron is also releasing the 6600 ION series, this time focusing on capacity instead of speed. This lineup is set to offer the world’s first E3.S 122TB datacentre SSD, boosting storage density by up to 67% and power efficiency by 37% – compared to a triple 36TB HDD set. Considering the exabyte-scale data centres these SSDs are meant to join, power savings will quickly add up to significant cost reductions.
As if this wasn’t already impressive, Micron is also preparing a mind-blowing 245TB option, boasting the highest single-drive capacity on the market. And here I am writing this on my 1TB SSD, reminding me that mainstream platforms have yet to break free from the 8TB ceiling.
Unlike the 9650, the 6600 ION drives are ‘only’ targeting 14GB/s sequential read speed due to their PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. The same goes for random access, which drops to 2 million read IOPS. Not surprising since these are optimised for capacity and efficiency.
Micron has indicated that 9650 SSD samples are shipping now to customers in multiple form factors, with the 6600 ION 122TB samples scheduled for Q3 2025. The 245TB version of the 6600 ION is planned for the first half of 2026.
As for us consumers, we have at least a few years to wait before Gen 6 SSDs reach us, with brands such as Silicon Motion not expecting them until 2030. Understandable, since AMD and Intel have yet to release any compatible platforms. Until then, keep pushing those Gen 4 and Gen 5 SSDs to their limit.
