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Micron 6600 ION 245TB SSD Review: A Quarter Petabyte Per Drive Bay

1 d ago

Micron’s 6600 ION NVMe SSD now reaches 245.76TB, pushing its PCIe Gen5 QLC line into quarter-petabyte territory. The company began shipping the 245TB model on May 5, 2026, positioning it as the highest-capacity commercially available SSD. The drive uses Micron’s ninth-generation G9 QLC NAND with a six-plane architecture and NAND I/O up to 3.6 GB/s, making it the fastest QLC in a data center SSD. Available in E3.L 9.5mm and U.2 15mm form factors, it targets hyperscale object storage, AI data lakes, analytics, and content repositories where capacity per rack and watts per terabyte are critical. Under Micron’s rack assumptions, a 720-drive E3.L configuration delivers 176.9PB raw capacity with 245.76TB drives, compared to 31.7PB with 44TB HDDs. Power efficiency is 8.2TB per watt vs. an estimated 4.4TB per watt for HDDs. This matters as global data center electricity consumption is projected to double to 945 TWh by 2030, with AI as the main driver. The drive is rated for read-heavy workloads: sequential read up to 13.7 GB/s, random read 1.78M IOPS, while writes are more restrained at 3.0 GB/s sequential and 42,000 IOPS random. The top model uses a 16K indirection unit, affecting endurance: 4K RDWPD drops to 0.075, while 16K RDWPD holds at 0.3. The 6600 ION supports enterprise features including OCP 2.6, NVMe 2.0d, SPDM 1.2, CNSA 2.0 firmware verification, and FIPS 140-3 L2 certification. It has a 2.5 million hour MTTF at 50°C. In benchmarks, the 6600 ION delivered 12,729.8 MB/s sequential read (second only to Micron’s 6550 ION) and 2,838 MB/s sequential write, with latency at 628µs read and 704µs write. It excelled in read performance but was mid-pack for writes, confirming its read-centric design.