Micron boasts that new PCIe 5.0 SSD is the world's fastest, most power-efficient 60TB drive

SSD not big enough? Well, how does a speedy 60TB solid-state drive grab you? Micron just revealed the ION 6550 as the "world's fastest, most energy efficient" SSD of this capacity, and it is indeed something of a powerhouse.

The catch, as you've no doubt guessed, is that this isn't a drive for consumers, but one for data centers.

Micron's ION 6550 is a PCIe 5.0 NVMe drive currently sampling with its customers ahead of a full release.

In a press release, Micron tells us:

"[The 6550] follows the success of the award-winning 6500 ION and is engineered to provide best-in-class performance, energy efficiency, endurance, security, and rack density for exascale data center deployments."

Unsurprisingly, it'll be serving AI usage, and other heavyweight lifting in data centers, such as public cloud storage, content delivery and so on.

The ION 6550 offers performance of 12GB/s while keeping power consumption at 20W, Micron tells us.

Endurance is also a strong suit here, delivering up to 42% better endurance than rival 60TB SSDs from Samsung, Solidigm and Western Digital, Micron asserts. It does so using 20% less power compared to these competitor drives, too (at 20W versus 25W).

Adding to the power-efficiency boasts, Micron informs us:

"The drive is also the world's first 60TB SSD with OCP 2.5 support, introducing the active state power management (ASPM). This new feature allows the drive to idle at 4 watts in the L1 state versus 5 watts in the L0 state, improving energy efficiency up to 20% when idling."

As ever, as we see larger capacity, faster drives in the enterprise and data center world, it also points the way to similar steps forward with consumer SSDs.