Micron has unveiled its latest flagship enterprise SSD, the 6500 ION, a product claimed to offer the world's largest capacity, fastest speeds, and top-tier energy efficiency. Key features include support for PCIe 5.0, a capacity of up to 60TB, and advanced TLC rather than QLC technology.

The Micron 6500 ION is offered in three form factors: U.2 15mm, E3.S-1T 9.5mm, and E1.L 9.5mm, all designed with components such as flash, master, cache, and firmware sourced entirely from Micron.

This innovative SSD utilizes Micron's eighth-generation TLC, featuring a 232-layer stack. It comes in versions with an original capacity of 30.72TB and 61.44TB, with general configuration options for 30TB and 60TB to ensure reliability. Notably, it is the first E3.S SSD on the market to achieve a 60TB capacity.

Although the 61.44TB capacity matches Solidigm's D5-P5338 released the previous year—making it a contender for the largest SSD in the world—the latter relies on 192-layer QLC flash memory, which is a generation older in terms of technology. Other competitors in this category include Samsung's BM1743 (with 176-layer QLC, two generations behind) and Western Digital's UltraStar DC SN655 (featuring TLC but three generations behind).

The Micron 6500 ION is unique among its peers as it supports the PCIe 5.0 x4 bus, a feature that naturally enhances its performance. It boasts sequential read and write speeds at a QD128 queue depth of up to 12GB/s and 5GB/s, respectively, while achieving random read and write performances of up to 160,000 IOPS and 70,000 IOPS. Impressively, a complete write operation can be accomplished in just 3.4 hours. Competing products, constrained by PCIe 4.0, simply can't match this level of performance.

Remarkably, the Micron 6500 ION also sets a high standard in energy efficiency, consuming no more than 5W while in standby mode and just 20W to achieve nominal performance, peaking at a mere 25W. In contrast, competing products typically consume between 20W and 25W under normal conditions. Per watt, its read and write bandwidths soar to 600MB/s and 250MB/s, respectively—more than double the efficiency of its competitors.

As for reliability, the Micron 6500 ION promises a mean time between failures of 2.5 million hours and an annual error rate not exceeding 1 in 10^17^. A robust 5-year warranty further underscores its dependability. Daily writes are supported at one full disk write per day for both 128KB sequential and 16KB random writes, 0.6-0.9 for 16KB/4KB mixed random writes, 0.5 for 8KB random writes, and 0.25 for 4KB random writes.

For enterprise-specific needs, it supports multiple standards and features including OCP 2.5, SPDM 1.2, SHA-512, FIPS 140-3 L2, SGK, and SRIS.