Micron announced its 6500 ION NVMe and the XTR NVMe SSDs today, with both drives designed specifically for workloads and use cases that reside at opposite ends of the data center SSD spectrum. The Micron 6500 ION NVMe SSD is designed for ultra-high-capacity applications - it is only available at a 30.72TB capacity point - to deliver a cost-effective blend of performance and endurance through the use of leading-edge 232-layer TLC NAND. The 6500 ION is the first data center SSD to use 200+ layer flash, which Micron says delivers the economics of QLC flash, yet none of QLC’s other inherent drawbacks, like reduced performance and endurance. The ION’s performance is impressive, too, with up to 6.8 / 5 GB/s of sequential read/write throughput and up to 1 million / 200,000 random read IOPS.
