Micron Shows World’s Fastest SSD – With PCIe 6.0 and Speeds Up to 27 GB/s

Micron and Astera Labs have demonstrated the world’s first PCIe 6.0 solid-state drive (SSD) at DesignCon 2025. The device was tested with Astera Labs’ Scorpio PCIe 6.0 network switch and Nvidia’s H100 graphics processor.

Image source: Astera Labs

Although Micron’s new SSD was first unveiled at the Astera Labs booth at DesignCon 2025 in the US in late February, official benchmark information was only published this week on the Astera Labs blog. During the tests, as Tom’s Hardware reports, the SSD demonstrated sequential read speeds of over 27 GB/s on each drive, exceeding the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs.

Interestingly, Micron previously announced the drive as the industry’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD in August last year, claiming a read speed of 26GB/s. However, testing at Astera Labs surpassed those expectations, with a read speed of 27.14GB/s. By comparison, the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD tested, the Crucial T705, maxed out at 14.5GB/s, which is only half of Micron’s new record.

The Astera Scorpio P-Series Fabric Switch, which supports up to 64 PCIe 6.0 lanes, helped achieve these results. This switch was designed for high-performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), providing fast communication between processors, graphics cards, and storage. In addition, the tests used Nvidia Magnum IO GPUDirect (GDS) technology, which allows storage devices to directly interact with GPU memory, bypassing the CPU and reducing latency.

It should be noted that the PCIe 6.x standard continues to improve and develop (the current version is PCIe 6.3), promising to become a new industry standard for both corporate solutions and, in the future, for consumer devices. If PCIe 5.0 provides a two-way throughput of up to 128 GB/s on the x16 bus, then PCIe 6.x will double this figure to 256 GB/s.

With the growing demand for speed in AI and HPC, PCIe 6.0 is already poised to deliver the speed boost the market has been waiting for, as confirmed by joint testing from Micron and Astera Labs.