Breaking the Speed Barrier Micron New Enterprise SSD Doubles PCIe 5.0 Performance.

Micron Unveils the 9650 SSD: The World’s Fastest Storage with Liquid Cooling and PCIe 6.0

Micron has officially shattered storage performance records with the launch of the Micron 9650 SSD. Engineered specifically for high-performance data centers, this drive is currently the fastest SSD in existence, pushing the boundaries of data transfer speeds and thermal management.

Unprecedented Speed and Performance

The Micron 9650 leverages the full potential of the PCIe 6.0 interface (originally introduced in 2022) to deliver a massive leap over previous generations:

• Sequential Read Speed: 28 GB/s  exactly double the 14 GB/s limit of PCIe 5.0 drives.

• Random Read Speed: 5.5 million IOPS (MIOPS).

• Sequential Write Speed: 14 GB/s.

• Random Write Speed: 900,000 IOPS (KIOPS).

The Arrival of Liquid-Cooled Storage

As storage speeds reach these extreme levels, heat management has become a critical challenge. In a move typically seen in high-end GPUs, the Micron 9650 features a Liquid Cooling system. This ensures the drive maintains peak performance during intensive workloads without thermal throttling, a first for mainstream enterprise storage.

Market Availability

The Micron 9650 has entered mass production and is currently being shipped to OEM hardware manufacturers and hyperscale data center providers. It is expected to become the new backbone for AI training and large-scale data processing infrastructures.

The secret to PCIe 6.0 being twice as fast as PCIe 5.0 lies in its switch to PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation 4-level) signal transmission, capable of transmitting 2 bits per signal cycle (compared to 1 bit in NRZ). This allows the Micron 9650 to easily overcome previous limitations.

In the year 2026, as AI models become increasingly large, the biggest bottleneck won't just be GPU speed, but the speed of "pulling data" from storage to memory. Read speeds of 28 GB/s will reduce AI checkpointing times and enable near-instantaneous loading of large databases.

Even with liquid cooling, Micron designed it to maximize rack density in data centers. This reduces the need for large fans in buildings and may help lower overall energy consumption in the long run for environmentally friendly data centers.

Although the 9650 is an enterprise-grade model, the technology from this model is likely to become the standard for gaming PCs in the next 2-3 years. The arrival of liquid-cooled SSDs may signal that future top-tier motherboards may need dedicated ports for connecting water cooling systems to SSDs. 

 

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Source: Micron