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

Micron has announced the world's first PCI Express 6.0 SSD, the Micron 9650, designed for AI training and inference workloads in data centers. The drive offers unprecedented read and write speeds, with sequential reads of 28,000 MB/s and sequential writes of 14,000 MB/s, significantly outperforming current consumer-grade PCI Express 5.0 SSDs. The Micron 9650 comes in both read-intensive (PRO) and write-intensive (MAX) configurations, with capacities ranging from 6.4TB to 30.72TB. It uses a PCI Express 6.2 interface and Micron's sixth-generation (G9) flash memory, delivering random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS and random write performance of 900,000 IOPS. While these performance figures are impressive, the Micron 9650 is not intended for consumer PCs, as it is designed for AI workloads in data centers. The high-performance nature of the drive also requires advanced cooling solutions, including liquid cooling options, to manage the heat generated by the hardware.