Almost a full year after announcing it, Micron finally launches the world's first PCIe 6.0 SSD with up to 28 GB/s sequential read speeds

A modified promotional image for Micron's 9650 NVMe PCIe 6.0 SSDs, with the original black background swapped for a gradient red one.

It's been three and a half years since the specifications for PCIe 6.0 were finalised and practically a full year since the first product to use the ultra-fast interface was announced, but the very first Gen 6 SSD is now finally ready to buy. Unless you're a PC gamer, that is, because Micron's new 9650 NVMe SSD is for AI servers only.

Version 6 of PCI Express was rubberstamped back in January 2022, and given its ultra-fast data transfer rates, it was obvious from the beginning that it was never going to appear first in the consumer market. Utilising PAM4 signalling (previously used by Micron for its GDDR6X VRAM chips for some of Nvidia's RTX 30-series graphics cards), each PCIe 6.0 lane can transfer 64 Gbps, bidirectionally.