Micron has announced a new SSD for data centers, the 6550 ION E3.S, which claims to be the world"s first PCIe Gen 5 solid-state drive with a capacity of 60TB. It is a successor to the 6500 ION model and promises to deliver faster performance, better energy efficiency, and more improvements for data centers.
The Micron 6550 ION operates at a peak speed of 12GB/s while consuming only 20W of power (4W when idle in the L1 state). In addition to claiming the title of the first-to-market E3.S 60TB SSD, Micron boasts 20% better energy efficiency than competitors.
While 60TB SSDs for data centers are not a new thing, adopting the PCIe Gen 5 interface enables significantly increased performance during workloads. Micron promises the following improvements over its competitors:
- 179% faster sequential reads and 179% higher read bandwidth per watt
- 150% faster sequential writes and 213% higher write bandwidth per watt
- 80% faster random reads and 99% higher read IOPS per watt
In more practical terms, the 6550 ION delivers 147% higher performance for Nvidia Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage and 30% higher 4KB transfer for deep learning IO Unet3D testing.
Micron will offer the 6550 ION in E3.S, U.2, and E1.L formats. 20 E3.S drives in a 1U server rack will total 44.2 petabytes of data, which improves storage density by 67%. Also, the manufacturer promises 42% better endurance than other 60TB SSDs from competing manufacturers.
The Micron 6550 ION SSD is now available for sampling. The manufacturer is not revealing any prices, but you can safely guess that a single 60TB PCIe Gen 5 will not be cheap. Also, do not expect Micron to sell the 6550 ION to regular consumers. If you need a high-capacity SSD for your computer, the best options are currently limited to 8TB models, such as WD_Black SN850X or a more affordable SATA-based Samsung 870 QVO.
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