Micron this week announced its 9650 SSD, the industry's first solid-state drive with a PCIe 6.0 x4 host interface aimed at performance-hungry workloads and offering unprecedented sequential read speed and random performance. In addition, the company formally introduced its 6600 ION family of SSDs with capacities of up to 245 TB.
Micron's data center-grade 9650 SSD is based on a proprietary controller designed in-house and the company's 9th Generation 276-layer 3D TLC NAND with a 3.6 GT/s interface. The PCIe Gen6 drive promises a sequential read speed of up to 28,000 MB/s and a sequential write speed of up to 14,000 MB/s, which by far exceeds the capabilities of the best SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface. As for random performance, the drive is speced for up to 5.5M read IOPS, which is a record, and up to 0.9M write IOPS, which is a moderate result for an enterprise-grade SSD.
