Micron Launches 9650 PCIe 6.0 SSD At A Blistering 28GB/s To Accelerate Hungry AI Workloads

Unsurprisingly, Micron is first out of the gate with a PCIe 6.0 SSD—and it's coming in hot. The company just unveiled a new lineup of data center drives built on the G9 NAND tech that first appeared in the 2600, and leading the charge is the Micron 9650, the world's first PCIe Gen6 NVMe SSD. It delivers sequential read speeds up to 28GB/s, 14GB/s writes, and 5.5 million IOPS, making it a serious contender for AI training workloads where throughput and latency can make or break performance.

The PCIe 6.0 spec was finalized back in January 2022, but there hadn't been any actual drives available for it until now, and even now, no mainstream or consumer platforms support PCIe Gen6, so the 9650 is strictly aimed at the data center crowd—hyperscalers, LLM training clusters, and anyone else building out serious ...