Micron introduces 60TB SSD that leads in speed and energy efficiency

Micron Technology, Inc. announced that it has begun certification with customers for the 6550 ION NVMe™ SSD. The Micron 6550 ION SSD is the world's leading 60TB data center SSD and the industry's first 60TB SSD for E3.S and PCIe 5.0. 1 The product continues the award-winning success of the 6500 ION SSD, delivering industry-leading performance, energy efficiency, durability, security, and rack density for ultra-large data centers. The 6550 ION SSD excels in handling high-volume NVMe workloads such as network AI data lakes, data intake, data preparation and inspection, file and object storage, public cloud storage, and analytical databases and content distribution.

Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron's Data Center Storage Business unit, said: "The Micron 6550 ION SSD achieves a transfer efficiency of 12GB/s while consuming only 20 watts, setting a new benchmark for data center performance and energy efficiency. As the first 60TB capacity SSD in the E3.S form factor, the Micron 6550 ION SSD delivers up to 20 percent more energy efficiency than its peers to meet the pressing need for large capacity and low power consumption for AI workloads."

Delivers superior performance and energy efficiency

The Micron 6550 ION is the industry's first PCIe 5.0 60TB data center SSD with better read/write bandwidth than competing devices. The product is also the industry's first 60TB SSD to support OCP 2.5, and thanks to active state Power Management (ASPM), the hard drive consumes only 4 watts of power in L1 idle mode compared to 5 watts in L0 state, saving up to 20% of energy when idle. The G8 NAND technology in the Micron 6550 ION delivers an additional power advantage, one to three generations ahead of NAND technology in competing 60TB SSDS on the market, requiring only 20 watts to achieve its stated performance. Compared to the competing 60TB SSD, the Micron 6550 ION SSD leads in the following ways:

· Increased sequential read rate by 179% and read bandwidth per watt by 179%

· Increased sequential write rate by 150% and read bandwidth per watt by 213%3

· 80% increase in random read rate and 99% increase in read IOPS per watt 3

The 6550 ION SSD offers significant advantages over other 60TB SSDS when it comes to critical AI training workloads:

· NVIDIA Magnum IO™ GPUDirect® Storage (GDS) improved performance by 147% and energy efficiency by 104%

· Improved 4KB transmission performance by 30% and energy efficiency by 20% in deep learning IO Unet3D testing

· AI model checkpoint completion time was reduced by 151%, while competing products consumed 209% of their energy

Despite its high capacity of 61.44TB, the Micron 6550 ION SSD can still fully write in 3.4 hours, which is up to 150% less time than competing models. This enables faster rates of hard drive reconstruction and AI training set preparation, which in turn reduces deployment time, improves GPU utilization, and enhances storage resilience for high-capacity NVMe SSDS.

Reduce size and improve data center efficiency

The Micron 6550 ION SSD is available in U.2, E1.S and E3.S form factor. As the world's first E3.S 60TB SSD, the Micron 6550 ION SSD offers market-leading density and reduces rack storage requirements by up to 67%. The product offers industry-leading space efficiency, storing more than 1.2 petabytes of data per rack unit (U). By using 1U high-density servers with 20 E3.S SSDS, operators can achieve a total storage capacity of 44.2PB in a single rack. While common 2U servers in the market can accommodate up to 24 U.2 SSDS and provide only 26.5 petabytes of storage per rack, Micron's solution increases density by 67%. In addition, the Micron 6550 61.44TB E3.S SSD delivers up to 3.3x more performance per TB than the 122.88TB U.2 SSD, allowing servers to be reduced in size and significantly consolidated to optimize data center space and efficiency.

Improve hard drive durability and security

The Micron 6550 ION SSD delivers industry-leading durability in a 60TB SSD with a random write durability of 1.0 random Full Disk Daily (RDWPD) of 16KB, which is 42 percent more durable than comparable 60TB SSDS on the market. In addition, the Micron 6550 ION SSD has an industry-leading portfolio of security features, including SPDM 1.2 certification and SHA-512. The Micron 6550 ION SSD is produced simultaneously at multiple manufacturing sites to ensure supply chain resilience and uses a vertically integrated architecture that incorporates Micron's own DRAM, NAND, controllers, and firmware.