With the ongoing, industry-wide DRAM and NAND shortages, right now it is a very good time to be a memory vendor. And things are even better if you have a cutting-edge PCIe Gen6 SSD to show off to data center customers, which was the case this year for Micron.
Micron 9650 Enterprise SSD
First announced by Micron last year, the company’s upcoming 9650 enterprise SSD is its first PCIe Gen6 SSD. Aiming at the data center market, Micron is going for broke on performance. The drives are rated for sequential read speeds of up to 28GB/second, which is fast enough to saturate a PCIe Gen6 x4 link right out of the gate with the company’s first Gen6 controller. Random read IOPS are getting a big boost as well, with Micron promising up to 5.5M IOPS.
The drive is clearly geared more towards reads than writes, so while the read performance ratings are significantly higher than Micron’s Gen5 9550 drives, at upwards of 2x the performance, the write performance gains are more mooted. The Gen6 drive’s write performance figures are rated at 14GB/second sequential and 900K IOPS random.
For their first generation of Gen6 drives, Micron is aiming right for the top of the market, which is to say the AI inference and training market. With storage I/O bandwidth becoming an ever-larger bottleneck, Micron believes (and is likely correct) that they will be the first and biggest customers for Gen6 SSDs, especially with new GPUs coming out soon to chew through model weights even faster.
It’s also fitting then that for the first time, Micron is going to need direct liquid cooling for one of its enterprise SSDs. The smallest form factor offering, the ultra-compact E1.S configuration, will be the company’s first SSD that is not just liquid-cooling capable, but liquid-cooling is all but required (or “optimized” rather than just “compatible,” as Micron puts it). This is designed to be paired with a high-performance GPU server environment, where liquid cooling is similarly becoming all but necessary. Micron’s performance figures for the drive assume a 25-Watt power consumption, underscoring how power-hungry these high-end server drives can be.
Under the hood, Micron is building these drives using their new PCIe Gen6 controller along with their ninth-generation (G9) TLC NAND running at 3600MT/sec. G9 is already in use in some of the company’s other products, so the 9650’s performance gains predominantly come from the controller itself.
Finally, according to the company, mass production on the 9650 SSDs has already begun. Though a demo will seemingly have to wait just a bit longer than Computex, as there are not any shipping (and thus publicly suitable) server platforms available with PCIe Gen6 connectivity at this time. The read-optimized PRO drives will be available in capacities up to 30.72TB, while the mixed workload MAX drives will be available in capacities up to 25.6TB.
Final Words
Of course, along with the PCIe Gen6 SSDs, we need more PCIe Gen6 servers. NVIDIA and AMD appear to be focused on launching in 2027. Intel Xeon 7 Diamond Rapids is on a different path. A number of hyper-scale designs and also designs like the Arm AGI CPU should also be arriving in the next few quarters, so that data centers can use these SSDs. Hopefully we get to see them soon.
