Micron 6550 ION is the world’s fastest 61.44 TB SSD in the E3.S form factor

Micron has unveiled the SSD 6550 ION, which is positioned as the world’s fastest 61.44 TB data center drive and the world’s first PCIe 5.0 x4 (NVMe 2.0b) drive in the E3.S form factor with such capacity. It’s designed to meet growing AI workloads while delivering best-in-class performance and up to 20% lower power consumption than competitive drive brands.

The nuance is that the fastest Micron 6550 ION is precisely with this combination of capacity, form factor and interface, and the comparison is made with solutions from Samsung, Solidigm and Western Digital, but not Kioxia. Typical power consumption of new products does not exceed 20 W. One of Western Digital’s models has exactly the same figure, but Micron’s solution is faster. The 6550 ION is OCP 2.5 compliant and features Active Power Management (ASPM). This allows the drive to consume 4 W in standby mode in the L1 state versus 5 W in the L0 state, which increases energy efficiency when idle by up to 20%.

Image source: Micron

The 6550 ION is suitable for creating data lakes for AI, for ingesting, preparing data and creating checkpoints during training, for storing files and objects, creating public cloud storage, maintaining analytical databases, as well as for content delivery systems. The 6550 ION is also said to deliver industry-leading storage densities, allowing customers to reduce data center footprint by up to 67% while delivering densities as low as 1.2 PB/1U.

The 6550 ION achieves sequential read/write speeds of up to 12.5/5.0 GB/s. The IOPS value when working with 4 KB data blocks is up to 1.6 million for random reading and up to 70 thousand for random writing. The 6550 ION can be fully written in 3.4 hours, while competing drives take 150% longer to fill, the company notes.

Source: ServeTheHome

In addition, the 6550 ION also outperforms SSDs of similar capacity in critical AI workloads, including running NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage (GDS), handling 4KB data blocks when training some networks, and creating checkpoints during AI training. When training LLM with billions of parameters, checkpoints are created quite often, and accelerators can be idle for tens of minutes while the data is flushed to the SSD.

Source: ServeTheHome

Micron 6550 ION is available in E3.S (1T), U.2 and E1.L form factors and has a capacity of 30.72 or 61.44 TB. Additionally, the 6550 ION is said to offer an industry-leading set of security features, including SPDM 1.2 for attestation and SHA-512 for secure signature generation. It is TAA compliant and FIPS 140-3 L2 certified.

The drive has a reliability of 1.0 RDWPD when writing 16 KB random blocks, and 0.25 RDWPD for 4 KB blocks. The operating temperature range extends from 0 to 70 °C. The MTTF is 2.5 million hours. Manufacturer’s warranty – 5 years. It is also noted that the 6550 ION consists entirely of components manufactured by Micron itself.