Micron announces 3610 SSD, the industry-first PCIe 5.0 QLC SSD available to OEMs — offers 4TB storage in a tiny single-sided M.2 2230 and 11,000 MB/s of performance
This will make PCIe 5.0 storage more affordable, giving mainstream PCs, ultra-thin laptops, and handheld devices higher read and write performance without breaking the bank.
Micron just announced the 3610 SSD, which offers PCIe 5.0 speeds with the higher density of Quad-Level Cell (QLC) chips. According to the company’s press release, this chip uses its G9 NAND that lets it achieve competitive PCIe 5.0 performance while offering more storage space in the same footprint. Because of this, Micron says that this is the first SSD in the world to offer 4TB in a compact single-side M.2 2230 form factor, allowing manufacturers to pack in so much more memory in thin-and-light laptops and handheld devices. Aside from the greater storage density, it’s also touted to have 43% better performance per watt for better power efficiency and battery life.
“The 3610 SSD combines cutting-edge PCIe Gen5 technology, Micron’s most-advanced G9 QLC NAND, and a sleek, single-sided design to deliver premium performance, capacity, and power efficiency,” Micron Mobile and Client Business Unit senior vice president Mark Montierth said. “The 3610 will enable ultra-thin devices that meet the growing demands of on-device AI, immersive streaming, and performance-intensive workloads.”
The memory and storage chip maker has previously used G9 TLC NAND on its high-end 4600 PCIe 5.0 NVMe client SSDs, which deliver a blistering 2.1M IOPS random read and write speeds, and up to 14,500 MB/s and 12,000 MB/s sequential read and write speeds in a 2280 form factor. While these are the best speeds that you can get from the company, it’s only available in 512GB, 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB capacities. While the brand-new 3610 SSD offers relatively lower speeds, Micron says that they’re still good enough for AI applications, capable of loading a 20-billion-parameter model in under three seconds.
More importantly, using QLC technology on the 3610 SSD means that Micron can cram more chips in a single wafer, cutting production costs and making PCIe 5.0 SSDs more accessible. And even though the denser design of this chip means that it likely runs hotter than previous generations, it comes with host-controlled thermal management, allowing it to run under for extended periods without compromising reliability.
Even though the company markets this for productivity devices and AI applications, handheld gaming enthusiasts will likely be excited for this chip to hit store shelves, too, as it effectively doubles the largest available M.2 2230 SSD on the market. This means that users can install several AAA titles on their devices without having to worry about running out of space. We don’t have pricing and availability information for these chips yet, especially as they’re still under OEM evaluation. Furthermore, we hope that this technology alleviates the ongoing storage crisis a bit, especially as it allows Micron to eke out larger storage capacity from the same wafer size.
Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Jowi Morales is a tech enthusiast with years of experience working in the industry. He’s been writing with several tech publications since 2021, where he’s been interested in tech hardware and consumer electronics.
-
w_barath Isn't this _not news_ ?Reply
Micron shut down Crucial and said they were ending their client flash business in favour of laser focus on AI servers. This is a client product. So which is it, lol. or is this announcement an error? -
thestryker Reply
Crucial being shuttered has literally nothing to do with Micron's business outside of the Crucial brand itself. These drives are for OEMs only which means build to order.w_barath said:Isn't this _not news_ ?
Micron shut down Crucial and said they were ending their client flash business in favour of laser focus on AI servers. This is a client product. So which is it, lol. or is this announcement an error? -
w_barath Reply
These days high-capacity SSDs, even with QLC, have higher TBW ratings than high-capacity HDDs.Stomx said:This is called planned odolescence. All QLC should have a label "For light use only"
This is because of four things:
1 QLC media has come a long way increasing the number of times it can be erased
2 Controllers for QLC have come a long way in charge balancing, error correction, and pseudo-SLC emulation all of which decrease QLC eraseblock operations
3 Early QLC drives tended to be DRAM-free for cost, but now there's host memory buffer taking the place of DRAM with similar benefits
4 HDD write rates have scaled sub-linear while capacity scaled exponentially. You'll run out of MTBF years before you hit 300 full drive writes with random access writes.
If you were around in the industry 10 years ago, people similarly maligned TLC. And then there was eTLC for Enterprise drives, which gave similar DWPD as MLC on a $ per GB written basis. Well today's QLC is now competitive with TLC on a $ per GB written basis. So no... it's not "planned adolescence ." HDDs are far more obsolescent from a data retention POV. -
w_barath Reply
Maybe Micron should have said they were getting out of the Retail flash market, instead of saying they were getting out of the Client flash market. Because this article plainly says these are new Client products, and while I haven't gone digging to verify that's the language Micron used, they still have a Director of Client Flash products... that seems to say it all.thestryker said:Crucial being shuttered has literally nothing to do with Micron's business outside of the Crucial brand itself. These drives are for OEMs only which means build to order. -
thestryker Reply
They never said what you're claiming in the first place.w_barath said:Maybe Micron should have said they were getting out of the Retail flash market, instead of saying they were getting out of the Client flash market. Because this article plainly says these are new Client products, and while I haven't gone digging to verify that's the language Micron used, they still have a Director of Client Flash products... that seems to say it all.
Here it took about 10s to find a quote:
"The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage," said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. "Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments."
-
Stomx Reply
People malign SSDs for the reason not just to malign.w_barath said:These days high-capacity SSDs, even with QLC, have higher TBW ratings than high-capacity HDDs.
This is because of four things:
1 QLC media has come a long way increasing the number of times it can be erased
2 Controllers for QLC have come a long way in charge balancing, error correction, and pseudo-SLC emulation all of which decrease QLC eraseblock operations
3 Early QLC drives tended to be DRAM-free for cost, but now there's host memory buffer taking the place of DRAM with similar benefits
4 HDD write rates have scaled sub-linear while capacity scaled exponentially. You'll run out of MTBF years before you hit 300 full drive writes with random access writes.
If you were around in the industry 10 years ago, people similarly maligned TLC. And then there was eTLC for Enterprise drives, which gave similar DWPD as MLC on a $ per GB written basis. Well today's QLC is now competitive with TLC on a $ per GB written basis. So no... it's not "planned adolescence ." HDDs are far more obsolescent from a data retention POV.
What relationship has MTBF of harddrive which is 200-300 years to the endurance of QLC ?
Even consumer grade TLC with all have endurance 0.3 DWPD =600 P/E cycles ones per year or two cause catastrophic failures in my software. That is why I do not like to see QLC. BTW, never seen a single problem with WD Gold Enterprise in two decades.
If currently exist QLC with 3k P/E endurances then there is no logical or economical or any other physical or technical reason (this is literally the same tech with TLC being even cheaper to build and with less overprovisioning even the same in density) to exist for TLC with 600 and even smaller one for QLC besides planned adolescence as the product which does not break is the worst nightmare for the producers. Consumer grade QLCs are like sh.t on the heads of unsuspecting technophobic consumers, like a cheap chineese toys which are designed not to last. -
abufrejoval Reply
Which is why it's a laptop product: few people run huge I/O intensive workloads on a laptop, but some people evidently need to carry huge read-mostly media libraries around.Stomx said:This is called planned odolescence. All QLC should have a label "For light use only"
I'd simply see it as another option in a constantly diversifying landscape of storage options.
I used to think the same about QLC and in most of my use personal use cases it wouldn't fit.
But then I read about an all-sollid state enterprise storage pioneer company which explained rather reasonably that the main issue with QLC is managing its "hotness" properly. It allowed them to push out spinning rust entirely while offering attractive economy. That made sense to me.
What's a bit sad is that the large knowledge gap between what the OS knows about files, their usage and their importance and what the SSD gets to see isn't properly exploited for managing storage management.
It would be tough to validate that code, too, not sure I'd trust my own idea ;-)
But for stuff like a Steam games cache, QLC seems quite acceptable, wouldn't want to trust it with my accounting data. -
thestryker Reply
You're comparing an enterprise grade HDD to consumer grade SSDs. I have enterprise QLC drives rated at ~1600TBW per 1TB of capacity. Also HDDs are generally rated to operate at well under 0.1 DWPD despite their rather high MTBF.Stomx said:People malign SSD for the reason not just to malign.
What relationship has MTBF of harddrive which is 200-300 years to the endurance of QLC ?
Even consumer grade TLC with all have endurance 0.3 DWPD =600 P/E cycles ones per year or two cause catastrophic failures in my software. That is why I do not like to see QLC. Never seen a single problem with WD Gold Enterprise in two decades.
If currently exist QLC with 3k P/E endurances then there is no logical or economical or any other physical or technical reason (this is literally the same tech with TLC being even cheaper to build and with less overprovisioning even the same in density) to exist for TLC with 600 and even smaller one for QLC besides planned adolescence as the product which does not break is the worst nightmare for the producers.
You may have never seen HDDs fail, but that's completely meaningless in the real world. I'd never seen a HDD fail personally until running RAID 6 for years. Out of 16 drives (8x 2TB originally then replaced with 8x 4TB) I only had one fail and one was on the way out when I retired the system after around 12 years of constant operation. I've also had zero SSDs fail during that time in any machine I've installed them into (probably around 18 or so drives) but I would certainly never claim they don't fail. It's a shame Backblaze hasn't kept up with publishing SSD stats, but the last time they were SSDs were about 50% better.
The biggest reason for the relatively low endurance on consumer grade SSDs is the increased capacity and M.2 format. Had development continued with a 2.5" drive format we'd likely see a broader range of endurance with premium drives having more.