Micron Ships Massive 245TB SSD as AI Data Center Storage Demands Surge

Micron has begun shipping massive-capacity 245.76TB 6600 ION series solid state drives (SSDs), the world's highest capacity commercially available in SSD form, to address a surge in demand for storage in the data center amid the modern day AI gold rush. According to Micron, the availability of SSDs offering a quarter of a petabyte of capacity essentially redefines high-capacity data center storage.

"AI workloads are driving massive growth in shared data, continuing the shift of data center storage share from HDDs toward SSDs. With 245TB in a single SSD, the Micron 6600 ION makes solid state storage the clear choice for modern data centers," said Jeremy Werner, senior vice president and general manager of Micron's Core Data Center Business Unit.

"This breakthrough capacity gives data center operators a critical new lever to improve rack-level total cost of ownership, especially as power availability becomes a defining constraint for AI infrastructure scale," Werner added.

All that said, Micron is not the first to ship a 245TB capacity SSD. That distinction belongs to Kioxia, which expanded its LC9 series last year with 245TB NVMe SSDs in both 2.5-inch and Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.L designs.

Likewise, Micron is offering its 245TB 6600 ION series in multiple form factors, including both U.2 and E3.L. Micron points out that the 245TB 6600 ION in E3.L trim requires 82% fewer racks to achieve the same amount of raw storage capacity compared to HDD deployments.

Beyond the form factors, Micron's 245TB SSDs pairs the company's G9 quad-level cell (QLC) NAND flash memory that the company says its "at least one generation ahead of any competing QLC used in data center SSDs," with a PCIe Gen 5 interface.

What that translates into in terms of performance is up to 13,000MB/s for sequential reads and up to 3,000MB/s for sequential writes. 4K random read and write metrics check in at up to 1.78 million IOPS and 42,000 IOPS, respectively, for the 245TB capacity. Reads (both sequential and 4K random) are a little higher for Micron's 122.88TB, 61.44TB, and 30.72TB options.

"Power consumption is equally transformative. The 245TB Micron 6600 ION SSD consumes up to 30 watts at maximum power, only half the power consumed of a comparable-capacity HDD deployment," Micron points out.

For AI workloads, Micron says its 245TB ION SSDs offer up to 84 times better energy efficiency, 8.6 times fasting AI preporcessing, and 3.4 times better ingest throughput with up to 29 times lower latency, compared to HDDs.

It appears Dell is getting first dibs on Micron's 245TB 6600 ION SSDs, as it plans to showcase the mega-capacity drives at Dell Tech World later this month.