Micron has launched its 9550 SSD, which the company claims is the world’s fastest data center solid-state drive (SSD).
The offering brings together the company’s own controller, NAND, DRAM, and firmware into a single product.
Micron says the integrated solution has been built to manage critical workloads such as AI, performance-focused databases, caching, online transaction processing (OLTP) and high-frequency trading.
It said that the offering enables “class-leading performance, power efficiency, and security features for data center operators.” This includes 14.0 GBps sequential reads and 10.0 GBps sequential writes, providing up to 67 percent better performance over SSDs from its competitors, Kioxia and Samsung. Micron said it used publicly available data about the companies’ 1 DWPD 7TB SSDs to make this determination.
Furthermore, Micron’s new SSD offers a 35 percent improvement on random reads of 3,300 KIOPS (thousand input/output operations per second), with random writes of 400 KIOPS, seeing a 33 percent improvement over the same competitive offerings.
The company said its 9550 SSD also offers “industry-leading performance” for AI workloads, providing up to 33 percent faster workload completion times and up to 60 percent faster feature aggregation in GNN (Graph Neural Network) training with Big Accelerator Memory (BaM) – a GPU-to-SSD data transfer method developed by Nvidia that doesn’t require a proprietary API.
According to MLPerf benchmarking tests, the 9550 SSD also uses up to 35 percent less SSD energy and up to 13 percent less system energy.
“The Micron 9550 SSD represents a giant leap forward for data center storage, delivering a staggering 3.3 million IOPS while consuming up to 43 percent less power than comparable SSDs in AI workloads such as GNN and LLM training,” said Alvaro Toledo, vice president and general manager of Micron’s Data Center Storage group.
“This unparalleled performance, combined with exceptional power efficiency, establishes a new benchmark for AI storage solutions and demonstrates Micron’s unwavering commitment to spearheading the AI revolution.”
Micron said the 9550 SSD has been designed to meet the demands of OEMS and hyperscalers and will be available in capacities ranging from 3.2TB to 30.72TB and in U.2, E1.S, and E3.S form factors.
In April, Micron received $6.14 billion in direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act to support the construction of three new memory chip fabs: Two in Clay, New York, and one in Boise, Idaho.
However, construction at the company’s New York fab has been delayed after two endangered species of North American bats were found to be living on the land the company was planning to develop.
