Micron's 9th gen NAND series debuts with world's first PCIe Gen 6 SSD

Micron Technology has introduced a trio of data-center SSDs built around its 276‑layer G9 NAND: the 9650 PCIe Gen 6 NVMe flagship, the capacity-focused 6600 ION series, and the latency‑optimized 7600 PCIe Gen 5 drive. Together, the new products aim to balance raw bandwidth, extreme density, and predictable response times for rapidly scaling AI clusters and cloud workloads.

The 9650 SSD is the first drive to ship with a four-lane PCIe 6.0 interface. Micron quotes sequential transfers of up to 28 GB/s read and 14 GB/s write alongside 5.5 million random‑read IOPS, while improved power management delivers up to 67 percent better energy efficiency than comparable Gen 5 solutions. Designed primarily for AI servers, the drive is offered in E1.S and E3.S form factors—air‑ or liquid‑cooled—and supports peer‑to‑peer transfers to Nvidia Blackwell GPUs through Astera Labs or Broadcom retimers without involving the host CPU.

Where raw capacity is the priority, the 6600 ION employs QLC NAND on a PCIe 5.0 platform. Launch capacities span 30.72, 61.44, and 122.88 TB, rising to a 245 TB variant scheduled for the first half of 2026. Micron claims 4.9 TB per watt and a 37 percent energy advantage over HDD arrays, allowing a single 1U server to house 2.4 PB of flash while cutting rack‑level power consumption by multiple megawatt‑hours per day.

The 7600 family rounds out the line‑up as a mainstream Gen 5 option that emphasizes latency. It sustains sub‑1 ms response times on workloads such as RocksDB and reaches 12 GB/s sequential reads, 7 GB/s writes, and up to 2.1 million random‑read IOPS—figures that double random‑write throughput over competing drives in its class.

Early samples of the 9650 and 7600 are already in customer qualification, while the 122 TB 6600 ION ships in Q3 2025 with the 245 TB model to follow in the first half of 2026. Together, the three drives position Micron to supply AI infrastructure with faster data paths, denser flash pools, and tighter quality‑of‑service guarantees, all underpinned by a vertically integrated controller, firmware, and NAND stack.