Micron has introduced its Micron 9550-series SSDs, which it claims are the fastest enterprise drives in the industry. The Micron 9550 Pro and 9550 Max SSDs with a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface promise unbeatable performance amid enhanced endurance and power efficiency, which will be particularly beneficial for data centersMicron’s 9550-series solid-state drives are based on a proprietary NVMe 2.0b controller with a PCIe Gen5 x4 interface and 232-layer 3D TLC NAND memory. The drives will be available in capacities ranging from 3.2 TB to 30.72 TB with one or three drive writes per day endurance as well as U.2, E1.S, and E3.S form factors to cater to the requirements of different types of servers.
As far as performance is concerned, the Micron 9550 NVMe SSD boasts impressive metrics, including up to sustainable 14.0 GB/s sequential read speeds and 10.0 GB/s sequential write speeds, which is higher compared to the peak performance offered by Samsung’s PM1743 SSDs. For random operations, it achieves 3,300 million IOPS in random reads and 0.9 million IOPS in random writes, again surpassing competitor offerings.
Micron says that power efficiency is another standout feature of its Micron 9550 SSD: It consumes up to 81% less SSD energy per terabyte transferred with NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage and up to 35% lower SSD power usage in MLPerf benchmarks compared to rivals. Considering that we are dealing with a claim by the manufacturer itself, the numbers should be taken with caution.
| Micron 9550 NVMe Enterprise SSDs | |||||
| 9550 PRO | 9550 MAX | ||||
| Form Factor | U.2, E1.S, and E3.S | U.2, E1.S | |||
| Interface | PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe 2.0b | ||||
| Capacities | 3.84 TB 7.68 TB 15.36 TB 30.72 TB |
3.2 TB 6.4 TB 12.8 TB 25.6 TB |
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| NAND | Micron 232L 3D TLC | ||||
| Sequential Read | up to 14,000 MBps | ||||
| Sequential Write | up to 10,000 MBps | ||||
| Random Read (4 KB) | up to 3.3M IOPS | ||||
| Random Write (4 KB) | up to 900K IOPS | ||||
| Power | Operating | Read: up to 18W Write: up to 16W |
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| Idle | ? W | ? W | |||
| Write Endurance | 1 DWPD | 3 DWPD | |||
| Warranty | 5 year” | ||||
“The Micron 9550 SSD represents a giant leap forward for data center storage, delivering a staggering 3.3 million IOPS while consuming up to 43% less power than comparable SSDs in AI workloads such as GNN and LLM training”, said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron’s’s Data Center Storage group. “This unparalleled performance, combined with exceptional power efficiency, establishes a new benchmark for AI storage solutions and demonstrates Micron’s unwavering commitment to spearheading the AI revolution.”
Micron traditionally offers its high-end data center SSDs in different flavors: the Micron 9550 Pro drives for read-intensive applications are set to be available in 3.84 TB, 7.68 TB, 15.36 TB, and 30.72 TB capacities with one drive writes per day (DWPD) endurance rating, whereas the Micron 9550 Max for mixed-use are set to be available in 3.2 TB, 6.4 TB, 12.8 TB, and 25.6 TB capacities with three DWPD endurance rating. All drives comply with the OCP 2.0 r21 standards and OCP 2.5 telemetry. They also feature SPDM 1.2 and FIPS 140-3 security, secure execution environment, and self-encrypting drive options.
Micron has not touched upon the pricing of the new drives as it depends on volumes and other factors.