Micron Begins Shipping 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD

Micron announced that it has begun shipping the 245TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD. The company introduced it as the highest-capacity commercial SSD, explaining that it targets AI, cloud, enterprise, and hyperscale storage demand.

The product is offered in U.2 and E3.L form factors and uses G9 QLC NAND. Micron emphasized that it is designed for large-scale AI data lakes and cloud-scale file/object storage.

The key points are rack-scale density and power efficiency.

• Micron claimed that compared to HDD-based deployments, the same raw capacity can be configured with 82% fewer racks.
• It stated maximum power draw of 30W, about half that of comparable-capacity HDD deployments.
• Based on its own lab tests, it highlighted up to 84x energy efficiency, up to 8.6x preprocessing, up to 3.4x ingest throughput, and up to 29x latency improvement in AI workloads.
• For object storage workloads, it presented up to 435x throughput per watt, up to 96x time to first byte, and up to 58x aggregate throughput.

However, these figures are mostly company-provided data based on comparisons with specific HDD arrays from Micron Engineering labs. Micron calculated that even at 1EB-scale deployments, energy usage is 1.9x higher for HDDs, and presented annual savings of 921MWh and a reduction of 438 metric tons of CO2.

The product is scheduled to be exhibited at Dell Tech World on May 18-21, and Micron emphasized that reducing power, cooling, and operational complexity is a key benefit for AI infrastructure.