Micron brings its first PCIe 5.0 SSD to market with 9550
A late entry to the PCIe 5.0 SSD market, the Micron 9550 intends to set itself apart from the veterans in the Gen 5 arena, including Kioxia and Samsung.
Micron introduced its first PCIe 5.0 SSD, giving customers an uptick in storage performance for use cases such as AI while increasing energy efficiency.
The Micron 9550 NVMe SSD is aimed at high-performance workloads, which include AI training where data needs to be transferred to GPUs. It uses the PCIe 5.0 interface, the latest connection interface, for data transfers and surpasses the Micron 9400 series in performance by roughly doubling the bandwidth and throughput.
Micron said the 9550 is now sampling with select customers, with general availability expected later this year. It added that the new SSD, which uses Micron's 232-layer NAND that offers more storage per chip, will be priced competitively with others in its class.
The industry is seeing a continual evolution of the storage market, and initiatives such as modernizing infrastructure to serve AI workloads are driving that evolution, according to Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst at IDC.
We're seeing a lot of the SSD vendors develop new drives to support some of these ever-changing requirements.
Jeff JanukowiczAnalyst, IDC
"We're seeing a lot of the SSD vendors develop new drives to support some of these ever-changing requirements," he said.
The Micron 9550 will initially compete with other PCIe 5.0 SSDs from Kioxia, which released its first Gen 5 drive in 2022, and Samsung, which first showcased its Gen 5 technology in 2021, Janukowicz said. But the market is only poised to grow as other data center SSD vendors will likely introduce their own versions in the coming year.
Performance to meet demand
The PCIe 5.0 interface enables the 9550 to achieve read speeds of 14 GBps and write speeds of 10 GBps, according to Micron. The drive is quoted at having 3.3 million IOPS for data reads and 400,000 IOPS for data writes, which the vendor highlights as being ideal for performance-demanding workloads.
In the case of AI, workloads require enormous amounts of data, processing and compute to train, deploy and maintain processes, according to Jim Handy, general director and semiconductor analyst at Objective Analysis. The faster that data can move, the faster the processing can be completed.
Cost is another factor, particularly for hyperscalers such as Meta and Microsoft that have invested in the infrastructure and are running AI workloads, Handy said. GPUs are expensive, but if they aren't fully utilized, hyperscalers can miss out on potential revenue.
"Let's just say that somebody's got a quarter-billion dollars' worth of GPUs, and they're idle for 10% of the time because they're waiting on SSDs to deliver the data," he said. "They will flock to something like [the 9550] so they can keep the GPUs running."
Micron is also touting the 9550's performance-to-power efficiency. For example, graph neural network workloads, which process graph data, are completed 33% faster with the 9550 compared with relative competitors, the vendor said. While total energy use is higher, the performance increase enables faster completion times and lower total energy consumption.
This is something that might not seem obvious at first, Handy said. An SSD that uses more power overall can save power in the long run in the data center.
"It's a problem with the way that people tend to look at things. They look at how much power is consumed rather than how much energy is consumed," he said. "Energy is power times time."
PCIe 5.0 and common form factors
Micron believes customers are looking to advance to PCIe 5.0 to get their full value from GPU investments. Janukowicz said investment in PCIe Gen 5 SSDs will depend on needs and budgets, as companies have tended to choose compute for AI initiatives rather than storage.
"Given some of the challenges last year in terms of overall spending numbers, I think if people revisit it now, they're looking to transition to Gen 5," he said.
The 9550 comes in the more common U.2 form factor as well as the Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) versions up to 30.72 TB. While newer server platforms are increasingly looking to change from U.2 to EDSFF drives for better signal integrity, there is still interest in the older form factor, Micron said.
In the past there was a concern that with the advent of PCIe 5.0, U.2 drives wouldn't have the signal integrity, Janukowicz said. However, he added, a lot of work has been put into making the form factor compatible with the newer interface.
"The 2.5-inch U.2 form factor is going to stick around, and we will see growth on EDSFF types of solutions as well," he said.
Adam Armstrong is a TechTarget Editorial news writer covering file and block storage hardware and private clouds. He previously worked at StorageReview.com.
