Specifications
Product Class
PCIe Gen6 data center NVMe SSD — industry first
Sequential Read
Up to 28 GB/s
Link Saturation
Saturates a PCIe Gen6 x4 link
Random Read IOPS
Up to 5.5 million
Controller
Micron's first PCIe Gen6 SSD controller
Form Factors
Including ultra-compact E1.S
Thermal Design
E1.S variant is liquid-cooling optimised rather than merely compatible
Deployment Target
GPU server environments with liquid-cooled GPU accelerators
Performance vs Prior Gen
Up to 2x the performance of PCIe Gen5 drives
Overview
The Micron 9650 is the world's first PCIe Gen6 data center SSD. Micron rates it for sequential reads up to 28 GB/s, which is enough to saturate a PCIe Gen6 x4 link from the first generation of its Gen6 controller, with random read performance up to 5.5 million IOPS. Against PCIe Gen5 drives that is up to double the throughput.
The product exists because GPU accelerators have outrun the storage fabric attached to them. A modern AI server can consume data faster than a Gen5 array can deliver it, so the drive becomes the bottleneck in the training pipeline. A Gen6 link removes that constraint and lets the storage tier keep pace with the compute tier.
The thermal design point is equally significant. Micron is building an ultra-compact E1.S variant for which liquid cooling is not simply supported but effectively required — Micron describes it as optimised rather than compatible. That is a deliberate match to the direction of GPU servers, where direct-to-chip liquid cooling is becoming the norm: a high-performance E1.S drive sitting beside a liquid-cooled GPU needs the same cooling approach to stay inside its thermal envelope.
Key Benefits
World's first PCIe Gen6 data center SSD. Up to 28 GB/s sequential read — saturates a Gen6 x4 link. Up to 5.5M random read IOPS removes the storage bottleneck ahead of GPU training. Liquid-cooling-optimised E1.S matches the thermal design of current GPU servers.
Applications
AI and machine-learning training clusters, GPU server storage tiers where per-GPU data feed rates exceed Gen5 flash, high-throughput inference serving, and dense E1.S deployments in liquid-cooled racks.
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