World’s first ultra-fast PCIe 6.0 SSD arrives, nevertheless it’s not for you

Transfer over, PCI Specific 5.0! Micron has shipped the primary PCI Specific 6.0 SSD, ramping up learn and write speeds to unprecedented ranges. The unhealthy information? It’s not for PCs.

This week, Micron shipped the Micron 9650 SSD, the world’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, designed for AI coaching and inference workloads. Sadly, these duties happen in AI knowledge facilities, not dwelling PCs.

Micron will ship the drive in each a PRO (read-intensive) and MAX (write-intensive) configuration, with capacities starting from 6.4TB to 30.72TB, relying on which taste a buyer buys.

Technically, the drives use a PCI Specific 6.2 interface, connecting to Micron’s six-plane, ninth-generation (G9) flash reminiscence. The kicker, although, is the efficiency. The Micron 9650 SSD household performs sequential reads of 28,000 MB/s and sequential writes of 14,000 MB/s (which is 100% larger and 40 % larger, respectively, than Micron’s earlier technology of SSDs).

Now evaluate that to one in every of our greatest SSDs, such because the Teamgroup Z540, a PCI Specific 5.0 drive: sequential reads are solely about 9,000 to 12,000 MB/s, with write speeds of about the identical. Micron’s 9650 reads knowledge at about double the speed of the Teamgroup drive.

Micron’s 9650 additionally performs random reads of 5.5 million IOPS and performs random writes of 900,000 IOPS. Micron says that the endurance of the drive begins at 14,016 terabytes written randomly or 58,300 terabytes written sequentially, and goes up from there.

The issue with these newer generations of SSDs, although, is warmth. Micron’s chips aren’t any exception. You’re most likely used to SSDs that ship with or with out warmth spreaders. These SSDs embrace these, with variations of the PRO sequence which might be additionally optimized for air cooling. However in addition they embrace a 9.5mm possibility designed to be liquid-cooled. Chip nerds can try Micron’s knowledge sheet (PDF) for extra info.

We’ve anticipated the primary PCI Specific 6.0 gadgets to ship this yr—and identical to that, they’ve delivered. Understand that these newest SSDs are designed for knowledge facilities, although, and never your PC. For that, chipmakers like Intel and AMD must decide to supporting PCI Specific 6.0 of their chipsets. Up to now, that hasn’t occurred.