Micron has released a 245-terabyte SSD for data centers.

      American Micron has begun shipping the 6600 ION solid-state drive with a capacity of 245 terabytes. The company claims it is the most spacious serial SSD for data centers on the market. The device was created for artificial intelligence tasks, cloud platforms, and enterprise storage.

      There is no exaggeration or marketing tricks here. Right now, competitors do not have a fully comparable product with the same availability. Samsung and SK hynix have announced similar models at 245 TB and above, but they are expected later this year. So Micron has gained a significant, albeit temporary, advantage.

      The capacity of the drives alone is not the main parameter when choosing equipment, but it cannot be ignored that each drive with such a large memory capacity significantly reduces the physical space in the rack. According to Micron, transitioning from hard drives to the 6600 ION reduces the number of racks needed by 82% for the same data volume. A standard 36U rack can hold nearly 177 petabytes of such drives. These are not just numbers; they represent a real opportunity to build more compact AI factories.

      Power consumption also favorably distinguishes the new product. The peak power of the device is only 30 watts. In comparison, an array of classic HDDs with the same capacity would consume several times more energy. In conditions where electricity shortages severely limit the development of data centers, this approach looks pragmatic.

      Reading speed is more important than writing speed

      Developers have focused on read-intensive scenarios. For AI, it is typical for huge volumes of data to be read for training models, while writing occurs relatively rarely. Sequential read speeds reach 13.7 gigabytes per second, while random read speeds are 1.78 million input-output operations. The write speed is more modest at around 3 GB/s, but for the stated tasks, this is not critical.

      In Micron's tests, data preprocessing for AI accelerated by 8.6 times compared to HDD arrays, latency was reduced by almost 30 times, and energy efficiency increased by 84 times. These figures are, of course, from the manufacturer's lab, but even accounting for marketing, the progress is evident.

      The Micron 6600 ION 245 TB does not attempt to be a universal drive for everyone. It is a specialized tool for data lakes, where storage density and power consumption during reading are paramount. There are currently no analogs available commercially, and the nearest competitors will only catch up by the end of the year, so right now, Micron is setting new standards for capacity SSDs in AI infrastructure.

      Detailed technical specifications of the new product are here (English).