Micron, a memory card technology organisation, has introduced the 6550 ION E3.S SSD for data centers, which claims to be the world’s first PCIe Gen 5 solid-state drive with a 60TB capacity.
It is the replacement to the 6500 ION model and promises quicker performance, increased energy efficiency, and other upgrades for data centers.
The Micron 6550 ION has a peak speed of 12GB/s and consumes just 20W of power (4W while idle in the L1 mode). In addition to being the first-to-market E3.S 60TB SSD, Micron has 20% higher energy efficiency than competitors.
While 60TB SSDs for data centers are not new, using the PCIe Gen 5 interface results in dramatically better performance during workloads. Micron boasts the following advantages over its rivals:
179% faster sequential readings and 179% better read bandwidth per watt 150% faster sequential writes and 213% higher write bandwidth per watt. 80% quicker random reads and 99% increased read IOPS per watt.
In practice, the 6550 ION provides 147% faster performance for Nvidia Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage and 30% higher 4KB transfer for deep learning IO Unet3D testing.
Micron will offer the 6550 ION in E3.S, U.2, and E1.L formats. 20 E3.S drives in a 1U server rack will total 44.2 petabytes of data, which improves storage density by 67%. Also, the manufacturer promises 42% better endurance than other 60TB SSDs from competing manufacturers.
The Micron 6550 ION SSD is now available for sampling.
