Micron on Monday introduced its 7500-series of SSDs that use the company's 232-layer 3D TLC NAND memory and slightly increase performance compared to the company's 7450-series drives. The new SSDs retain a PCIe Gen4 interface and address mainstream data center storage applications, including cloud servers and enterprise servers.
Micron's new 7500-series SSDs leverage the same controller and the platform originally introduced with the 7450-series drives. The new SSDs are not rebadged drives, but rather majorly revamped products with new firmware and different memory. As a result, Micron's 7500 SSDs have sub-1 ms Quality-of-Service (QoS) latency as well as lower latencies than as well as higher sequential and random read/write performance.
Micron says that the new 7500-series drives boast maximum sequential read speeds of up to 7,000 MB/s, as well as sequential write speeds of up to 5900 MB/s, which is slightly higher compared to 7450-series SSDs. As for random performance, we are talking about up to 1.1 million random read IOPS and up to 400 thousand random write IOPS, which is in line with what some of the best consumer SSDs offer. As for latencies, optimizations there were a key goals of developers, which is why Micron's 7500-series drive beats the competition in RocksDB (according to the company). Meanwhile, some of Micron's competitors use 3D QLC memory, which is why those drives, by definition, have worse latencies than the 7500-series.
Unlike Micron's 7450-series drives, the company's 7500 SSDs target mainstream NVMe datacenter applications and will only ship in U.3/U.2/15mm form-factors as these are the most popular server drive form-factors. From the capacity point of view, these new drives continue to offer a wide range of options starting from 800GB, going all the way to 15.36TB.
The company will continue to offer capacity-optimized read-intensive 7500 Pro drives with an up to 15.36 TB capacity and 1 drive writes per day (DWPD) rating, as well as endurance-focused mixed use 7500 Max SSDs with 3 DWPD rating.
One important addition to Micron's 7500 SSDs is compliance with TCG Opan 2.01 specification, as well as SPDM 1.2 attestation, SHA-512, 384, and 256 support as well as RSA encryption with 3072b and 4096b key strength. These security capabilities are required to win lucrative contracts with U.S. government, which has specific requirements for security capabilities.
The Micron 7500 family is now available from select OEMs and the company's channel partners. Prices depend on volumes and other factors.
