Micron 9650 E1.S 15.36TB — PCIe Gen6 Data Center SSD (Liquid-Cooling Ready)

Specifications

Overview

The Micron 9650 is the industry's first PCIe Gen6 data center SSD in mass production. The E1.S 15.36 TB variant is the liquid-cooling-ready configuration — Micron explicitly makes the E1.S form factor available for liquid-cooled servers while the E3.S version covers air-cooled chassis.

Gen6 doubles the per-lane signalling rate of Gen5 using PAM4, and Micron pushes that to 28 GB/s of sequential read on a four-lane link — a 100% increase in sequential read and 61% improvement in random read over its own PCIe Gen5 predecessor. That performance is delivered on Micron G9 TLC NAND with a six-plane architecture.

The efficiency story is equally important for AI rack design: up to 1,120 MB/s per watt on sequential reads, roughly double the previous generation, with a power ceiling of 18 W. In an AI training cluster the storage tier is there to keep the GPUs fed, and this is the first SSD generation designed explicitly around that framing.

Key Benefits

28 GB/s sequential read — first PCIe Gen6 SSD in volume production. 1,120 MB/s per watt — roughly double the Gen5 efficiency. Liquid-cooling option — E1.S variant for immersion and cold-plate servers.

Applications

AI training and inference data pipelines, GPU-adjacent scratch storage, retrieval-augmented generation pipelines with large context windows, liquid-cooled AI servers, and Gen6 storage backplanes.

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