Micron has introduced the 6550 ION solid-state drive, the industry's first 60TB SSD that features a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface and therefore boasts with extreme capacity and very high performance. The drive is aimed at applications that require significant amount of storage as well as decent performance, which includes AI training and inference workloads. Micron also touts improved energy efficiency of its new drive compared to predecessors and competing offerings.
Micron's 6550 ION SSD comes in a E3.S form-factor and is based on the company's eight-generation 3D NAND with 232 active layers that combines high storage density, high performance, and low power consumption. The new drive delivers read and write speeds of 12GB/s while operating on just 20 watts of power, making it 20% more efficient than leading competitor drives. For those who want to have even higher performance, the drive can operate at 25W, though Micron does not expect many customers to use this mode.
Power management is a significant advantage of Micron's 6550 ION as it employs active state power management (ASPM), idling at only 4 watts in its low-power mode and provides up to 20% better idle efficiency than other 60TB SSDs.
"The Micron 6550 ION achieves a remarkable 12GB/s while using just 20 watts of power, setting a new standard in data center performance and energy efficiency," said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron’s Data Center Storage Group. "Featuring a first-to-market 60TB capacity in an E3.S form factor and up to 20% better energy efficiency than competitive drives, the Micron 6550 ION is a game-changer for high-capacity storage solutions to address the insatiable capacity and power demands of AI workloads."
This drive is particularly valuable for AI workloads as it shows a 147% improvement in Nvidia Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage operations and is 30% more efficient in deep learning Unet3D transfer tasks with a 4KB transfer size. It further excels in model checkpointing, completing tasks 151% faster and consuming 209% less power than its counterparts, making it an ideal choice for AI model training and deployment.
The main selling point of Micron's 6550 ION is of course its 60TB (well, 61.44TB) capacity. A 1U rack with 20 of such drives can hold over 1.2 PB of data per rack unit, which greatly optimizes server space. A single rack can accommodate up to 44.2 PB with this setup, achieving a 67% increase in density compared to traditional 2U racks that hold 'only' 26.5 PB. Meanwhile, when compared to 122.88TB U.2 drives, the Micron 6550 61.44TB E3.S SSD delivers up to 3.3x the performance per terabyte.
The drive also boasts strong endurance and security, offering a best-in-class rating of 1.0 random drive writes per day (RDWPD) for 16KB random writes, which is 42% higher than competitive models, according to Micron. To safeguard data, it includes SPDM 1.2 for device attestation and SHA-512 for secure signature generation, and meets TAA-compliance and FIPS 140-3 L2 certifiability standards, which is important for government and security-sensitive applications.
Micron's 6550 ION is currently sampling and the first batch will be available to select customers only. As a result, Micron does not really talk about pricing of these drives as actual prices will depend on volumes and other factors.
