Micron's new SSD replaces disk for fast access storage

Micron has doubled the capacity of its PCIe Gen5 6600 ION SSD to 245 TB, saying it needs far less power and physical space than hard disk drives.

It’s doing this at a time when SSDs are costing up to 22.6 times more than HDDs on a per-TB basis, and is compensating for this with power and rack space savings. Micron says that 1.9 times more energy is required for HDDs versus 245 TB Micron 6600 ION SSDs in a 1EB deployment. Customers also get up to 84 times better energy efficiency, 8.6 times faster AI preprocessing and 3.4 times better ingest throughput, with up to 29 times lower latency for AI workloads.

Jeremy Werner, SVP and GM of Micron's Core Data Center Business Unit, said: “AI workloads are driving massive growth in shared data, continuing the shift of data center storage share from HDDs toward SSDs. With 245TB in a single SSD, the Micron 6600 ION makes solid state storage the clear choice for modern data centers. This breakthrough capacity gives data center operators a critical new lever to improve rack-level total cost of ownership, especially as power availability becomes a defining constraint for AI infrastructure scale.” 

Micron says the new 6600 ION is the world’s highest capacity commercially available SSD. It requires 82 percent fewer racks to achieve equivalent raw storage capacity compared to HDD-based rack. With 40 x E3.L SSDs per 2U server, the 6600 ION offers up to 6.8x the capacity per rack versus legacy HDDs.

Travis Vigil, SVP, ISG product management, at Dell Technologies, said: "It's a meaningful reduction in total cost of ownership for customers building out AI and large-scale data center environments." This implies Dell will be taking this drive on board.

The new ION uses the same gen 9 276-layer QLC (4bits/cell) 3D NAND as before, with the same six-plane architecture. It’s available in both U.2 and E3.L formats with 30.72, 61.44, 122.88 and 245.76 TB capacity points. All versions are available in the U.2 format but only the 245.76 TB variant comes in the E3.L format. 

The performance is pretty much the same as the previous generation; 

Download a full product brief here. Read more about the SSD, its performance and positioning in a blog.

Bootnote

Kioxia has a 245.76 TB LC9 SSD, with a PCIe Gen5 interface, announced in July last year, but even so Micron claims its 6600 ION is the world’s highest-capacity commercially available SSD. JV partner Sandisk has announced a 256 TB SSD that will ship in the first half of this year. We expect competitors Samsung and SK Hynix, with subsidiary Solidigm, to have comparable drives later this year.