Micron unveils world's first PCIe 5.0 60TB SSD for AI workloads and cloud storage
Faster and more energy efficient than existing 60TB SSDs
by Kishalaya Kundu · TechSpotServing tech enthusiasts for over 25 years.
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What just happened? Micron has joined Samsung, Solidigm, and Western Digital as one of the only data storage solution providers to have unveiled a 60TB-class SSD. However, unlike the existing models that use the PCIe Gen 4 bus, the Micron SSD utilizes PCIe Gen 5 with the promise of faster performance and better energy efficiency than its competitors.
Micron claims that the 6550 ION is the world's fastest 60TB data center SSD and the industry's first E3.S solid state drive. It has a 61.44TB capacity and can be fully written in just 3.4 hours, which is 150 percent faster than competing drives. It is engineered to provide the fastest performance, best energy efficiency, highest endurance, top-notch security, and best-in-class rack density for exascale data center deployments.
The Micron 6550 ION is designed for networked AI data lakes, as well as ingest, data preparation and checkpointing, file and object storage, public cloud storage, analytic databases, and content delivery. It offers read and write speeds of up to 12GB/s while using just 20 watts of power, making it 20 percent more efficient than other 60TB enterprise SSDs.
The 6550 ION delivers up to 179 percent faster sequential read bandwidth and 213 percent higher write bandwidth per watt. It is also said to offer 147 percent higher performance for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage (GDS) and 30 percent higher 4KB transfer performance for deep learning IO Unet3D testing. Micron is also claiming a 151 percent improvement in completion times for AI model checkpointing while consuming less energy than competing products.
The new Micron SSD is available in E3.S, U.2, and E1.L form factors. It can be used in high-density 1U servers in sets of 20 E3.S drives to achieve a total storage capacity of 44.2 petabytes in a single rack. This solution is 67 percent denser than 2U servers that often house a maximum of 24 U.2 drives, yielding only 26.5 petabytes per rack.
The new SSD is currently sampling globally, with the first batch expected to be available only for select customers. We don't know when it will be commercially deployed by data centers and enterprises. Micron did not announce the pricing either, but it will likely depend on the volume and local taxes.