Your SSD Is Not As Capacious As Micron's Beastly New 60TB PCIe 5.0 Storage Drive

When you think of bulk storage, you probably still think about hard drives, and that's fair enough; spinning rust still offers superior value in terms of price per gigabyte. When storage density is more important than value, though, solid-state drives win again. That's because there are SSDs like Micron's new ION 6550, which can store up to 60TB in a 2.5" form factor.

While it isn't the absolute largest single SSD we've ever seen—that honor goes to the Nimbus Exadrive, which comes in a 100TB capacity—it is among the most impressive combinations of high capacity and high speed we've ever laid eyes on. That's because this drive supports PCIe 5.0 offering transfer rates up to 12 GB/second and random access rates as high as 1.6 million IOPS.


Micron also says that the ION 6550—or possibly the 6550 ION; the company's materials aren't clear on the order—is also the most energy-efficient datacenter SSD SSD available. It justifies this claim by comparing transfer rates on a per-watt basis against other datacenter SSDs, where it comes out well ahead of competing SSDs from Solidigm, Samsung, and Western Digital.


Also notable is that the ION 6550 comes in the new E3.S and E1.L form factors as well as the more familiar 2.5" U.2 form factor. Micron gleefully notes that this is the first 60TB SSD to be available in E3.S, which purportedly makes it the highest-density PCIe 5.0 SSD on the market; Micron says that it's possible to load 44.2 petabytes—that's 44,200 terabytes—into a single 19" rack server.


Perhaps most impressively, the 6550 ION also has solid endurance. Micron claims 1 drive write per day endurance for the drive, which doesn't sound great until you remember that we're talking about a 60TB SSD. Micron claims this gives the drive 42% more endurance than its competitors, a claim which we haven't verified, but which certainly sounds impressive, at least.

If you're keen to order some of Micron's new SSDs, you'll need to get in touch with a sales representative, because these drives aren't likely to be sold directly to consumers. Indeed, we expect that these drives will be high demand, and that their pricing will likely be in "if you have to ask..." territory.