Micron's New 3610 SSD With G9 QLC Aims To Bring Gen5 Storage To Everyone

Micron's out at the Consumer Electronics Show shouting, 'You get a Gen5 SSD, you get Gen5 SSD, you get a Gen5 SSD!'. Okay, maybe not quite literally, but it did use the annual tech showcase as a launchpad for its new Micron 3610 NVMe solid state drive family, which it's billing as the industry's first PCIe Gen5 Q9 QLC SSDs for client computing.

The bigger implication there is that it's "democratizing premium speed" and power efficiency for consumer devices like ultra-thin laptops and AI-ready gadgets. It's a positive sign after Micron recently announced plans to pull its Crucial brand from the consumer market to focus its efforts on "larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments," which is code for feeding the AI beast (i.e., data center customers, for the most part).

Micron's 3610 SSDs, on the other hand, are built for mainstream PCs. The ...