The world’s first bleeding-edge PCIe 6.0 SSD is here (but not for you)

Move over, PCI Express 5.0! Micron has shipped the first PCI Express 6.0 SSD, ramping up read and write speeds to unprecedented levels. The bad news? It’s not for PCs.

This week, Micron shipped the Micron 9650 SSD, the world’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, designed for AI training and inference workloads. Unfortunately, those tasks take place in AI data centers, not home PCs.

Micron will ship the drive in both a PRO (read-intensive) and MAX (write-intensive) configuration, with capacities ranging from 6.4TB to 30.72TB, depending on which flavor a customer buys.

Technically, the drives use a PCI Express 6.2 interface, connecting to Micron’s six-plane, ninth-generation (G9) flash memory. The kicker, though, is the performance. The Micron 9650 SSD family performs sequential reads of 28,000 MB/s and sequential writes of 14,000 MB/s (which is 100 percent higher and 40 percent higher, respectively, than Micron’s previous generation of SSDs).

Now compare that to one of our best SSDs, such as the Teamgroup Z540, a PCI Express 5.0 drive: sequential reads are only about 9,000 to 12,000 MB/s, with write speeds of about the same. Micron’s 9650 reads data at about double the rate of the Teamgroup drive.

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

The problem with these newer generations of SSDs, though, is heat. Micron’s chips are no exception. You’re probably used to SSDs that ship with or without heat spreaders. These SSDs include those, with versions of the PRO series that are also optimized for air cooling. But they also include a 9.5mm option designed to be liquid-cooled. Chip nerds can check out Micron’s data sheet (PDF) for more information.

We’ve expected the first PCI Express 6.0 devices to ship this year—and just like that, they’ve delivered. Keep in mind that these latest SSDs are designed for data centers, though, and not your PC. For that, chipmakers like Intel and AMD will have to commit to supporting PCI Express 6.0 in their chipsets. So far, that hasn’t happened.