Micron Technology announced that the Micron 6550 ION is available for sampling worldwide, aiming to meet the increasing demands of data-intensive and AI-driven environments with more efficiency and performance.
The 6550 ION NVMe SSD is the first in the industry with a 60TB capacity in the E3.S form factor, using PCIe Gen5 technology. It offers more performance, energy efficiency, and endurance for high-demand data center applications, such as AI data lakes and cloud storage.
Achieving up to 12GB/s of throughput with only 20 watts of power, it delivers 179 percent faster sequential reads and 150 percent faster writes than competitors, improving energy efficiency by up to 20 percent at idle.
The 6550 ION excels in AI training tasks, offering 147 percent better performance with NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage and achieving up to 151 percent improvement in AI model checkpointing times over other 60TB drives.
Available in E3.S, U.2, and E1.L form factors, the 6550 ION reduces rack storage by up to 67 percent. A single 1U server can house over 1.2 petabytes, offering industry-leading density for data centers.
Designed for high endurance, it supports up to 1.0 random drive writes per day with advanced security features like SPDM 1.2 and SHA-512 for secure data handling.
Major companies like AMD, VAST Data, and WEKA are collaborating with Micron, emphasizing the 6550 ION’s compatibility with advanced computing and AI workloads.
