Micron Launches 9650 PCIe 6.0 SSD At A Blistering 28GB/s To Accelerate Hungry AI Workloads
The PCIe 6.0 spec was finalized back in January 2022, but there hadn't been any actual drives available for it until now, and even now, no mainstream or consumer platforms support PCIe Gen6, so the 9650 is strictly aimed at the data center crowd—hyperscalers, LLM training clusters, and anyone else building out serious AI infrastructure. Micron offers the drive in capacities up to 30.72TB, with both air- and liquid-cooled options in E3.S and E1.S form factors.
Rounding out the new portfolio are two other G9-powered SSDs:
- The Micron 6600 ION, a follow-up to last year's already-capacious 6550 ION, brings massive storage density to the table. It's shipping in a 122TB E3.S model later this year, with a 245TB version expected in 2026. That's enough for 88.5PB of flash in a single rack, according to Micron's math, while using far less power and space than traditional HDDs.
- The Micron 7600, a PCIe Gen5 SSD, targets latency-sensitive workloads like AI inference and high-performance databases. It hits 12GB/s reads, 7GB/s writes, and manages sub-millisecond response times under heavy RocksDB workloads—pretty much ideal for applications that need snappy, consistent storage performance.
Micron's positioning is clear: the 9650 is for top-end AI pipelines, the 6600 ION is for vast cost- and power-efficient data lakes, and then the 7600 is the jack-of-all-trades for general AI and enterprise workloads—not 'budget', but certainly more accessible than the 9650. Of course, none of these are meant for the average user or workstation, but that's the point. The 9650 and 7600 SSDs are now sampling to customers, while the 6600 ION will ship in Q3 of this year.
