Micron announces industry first PCIe Gen6 SSD, claims 26GB/s transfer speed

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Drive to be showcased at FMS 2024 this week.

Micron
(Image credit: Micron)

Micron has announced the development of the industry's first PCIe Gen6 SSD. Claimed to be capable of "sequential read bandwidths of over 26GB/s," the new SSDs are being prepared for data center operating partners.

The development of this super-fast new PCIe Gen6 data center SSD is claimed to be the world's first by Micron in its press release. Unsurprisingly, in the current computing era, the turbo-charged storage tech is heralded as capable of addressing the mounting demands of AI processing.

The U.S. memory and storage tech giant says it will provide some kind of demonstration and/or showcase of a PCIe Gen6 SSD at the ongoing Flash Memory Summit 2024 (FMS 2024). This event kicks off today and ends on Thursday, Aug 8.

Micron isn't very clear about the scope of its PCIe Gen6 SSD showcase. It claims that the new drives will be capable of delivering "sequential read bandwidths of over 26GB/s," though, so we hope there will be some images or videos of systems reporting these speeds from Micron's keynote, or from booth #107 on the show floor at the Santa Clara Convention Center.

For some context to the headlining 26GB/s SSD data transfer speeds, our frequently updated best SSDs of 2024 feature highlights the Crucial T705 as the current fastest consumer SSD available. It uses the PCIe 5.0 x4 interface to deliver sequential reads/writes of up to 14.5/12.7 GB/s. Using these values for comparison, the new PCIe Gen6 SSD from Micron is roughly 80% faster.

Micron at FMS 2024

(Image credit: Micron)

Hopefully, we will find out lots more about the Micron PCIe Gen6 SSD during the FMS 2024. As well as the booth #107 presence, we could hear and see more about it during Micron's keynote. Also, there's a Micron session dubbed "PCIe Gen6 electrical consideration and characterization for HVM SSDs" scheduled for Thursday.

Micron's SVP and GM of the Compute and Networking Business Unit, Raj Narasimhan, will deliver a keynote at FMS 2024: The Future of Memory and Storage on Wednesday, Aug 7 at 11 am PT. The keynote is titled “Data is at the heart of AI: Micron memory and storage are fueling the AI revolution,” and will focus on how Micron's advanced products address AI industry needs and enable faster and more power-efficient processing of vast data sets.

Mark Tyson
Mark Tyson
News Editor

Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom's Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.

10 Comments Comment from the forums
  • A Stoner
    I do not even remember PCIe being released already... I have not even contemplated buying any of the PCIe5 devices and they are already sporting the next generation! Amazing. I wonder how much faster my browser will run with 26 GB/s hard drive.
    Reply
  • Eximo
    PCIe generally trickles down from enterprise. Just look at it as a preview of things to come.

    X670 / X670E boards are the ones with enough 5.0 lanes to be somewhat practical. Intel still thinks you should share GPU and M.2 bandwidth for that.

    Next gen consoles are likely to be PCIe 5.0, that is when we will start to see the impact of game developers requiring it.
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    & how hot does it get when actually hitting them speeds for more than a few seconds?

    Gen5 already thermal throttle often w/o large (for the m.2 size) heatsinks.
    Reply
  • tyns78
    ...and the 3dxp they abandoned would still provide better performance in all areas except sequential reads (sequential writes large enough for that speed to matter would quickly fill the SLC cache and slow to a relative crawl)
    Eximo said:
    PCIe generally trickles down from enterprise. Just look at it as a preview of things to come.

    X670 / X670E boards are the ones with enough 5.0 lanes to be somewhat practical. Intel still thinks you should share GPU and M.2 bandwidth for that.

    Next gen consoles are likely to be PCIe 5.0, that is when we will start to see the impact of game developers requiring it.

    8x pcie 4 is like a 1% perf drop over 16 lanes. PCI-E 5 has always just been a big number marketing gimmick.

    Optane devices will still smoke this pci-e 6 device in any metric that actually matters in real world usage. Sequential write speed declines so rapidly for nand devices I don’t see how this increase will make a real difference.

    I’d love to see x4 slots for gpu’s and x1 slots for nvme and everything else so we finally get some expansion lanes to work with again
    Reply
  • Justare
    I need this in my next gaming pc. When will motherboards include PCIe Gen 6 x4?
    Reply
  • Eximo
    tyns78 said:
    I’d love to see x4 slots for gpu’s and x1 slots for nvme and everything else so we finally get some expansion lanes to work with again

    It would be neat if they started making a smaller GPU standard. Already seen some efforts with the 8x GPUs that include an M.2 slot. Bifurcation would have to become standard for that to work in practice.

    8x and 4x GPUs are actually super common already, just in the mobile sector. Lets them cheap out on the motherboards to not use a full 16 lanes.

    But it seems like the beefy discrete GPUs are here to stay for a while.

    CAMM style GPUs like we had for MXM would be pretty cool. I always thought it would be very interesting to have a back of the motherboard mount for the GPU which would free up space on the top side of the board for more traditional expansion cards. Separate airflow path for the GPU and CPU as well. Since big GPUs are 3.5 slots, you really only get three slots on an ATX board. And to make things nicer, most other expansion cards that a consumer uses are generally not full height, so making the 'standard' half height would prevent chassis from getting wider (though people seem fine with current dual chamber designs)

    It would take a pretty concerted effort though. CPU cooler compatibility would be an issue and all new chassis. But I also see CPU + CAMM module coolers making for a very interesting outcome.
    Reply
  • thestryker
    Eximo said:
    Next gen consoles are likely to be PCIe 5.0, that is when we will start to see the impact of game developers requiring it.
    While they might use PCIe 5.0 it's unlikely to have any real impact. The Xbox SSD basically runs under PCIe 3.0 bandwidth and the PS5 one is in the ~5GB/s range. Neither SSD has any real raw performance but rather rely on the controllers and software to make the difference. I imagine most of the improvements will be on the controller and design side of things as opposed to leveraging anything from newer PCIe versions.
    Reply
  • jp7189
    tyns78 said:
    ...and the 3dxp they abandoned would still provide better performance in all areas except sequential reads (sequential writes large enough for that speed to matter would quickly fill the SLC cache and slow to a relative crawl)


    8x pcie 4 is like a 1% perf drop over 16 lanes. PCI-E 5 has always just been a big number marketing gimmick.

    Optane devices will still smoke this pci-e 6 device in any metric that actually matters in real world usage. Sequential write speed declines so rapidly for nand devices I don’t see how this increase will make a real difference.

    I’d love to see x4 slots for gpu’s and x1 slots for nvme and everything else so we finally get some expansion lanes to work with again
    You're not wrong, but the thing that counts above almost anything else in the enterprise world is capacity and cost per RU. That is the reason those techs won't see mass adoption.
    Reply
  • Eximo
    thestryker said:
    While they might use PCIe 5.0 it's unlikely to have any real impact. The Xbox SSD basically runs under PCIe 3.0 bandwidth and the PS5 one is in the ~5GB/s range. Neither SSD has any real raw performance but rather rely on the controllers and software to make the difference. I imagine most of the improvements will be on the controller and design side of things as opposed to leveraging anything from newer PCIe versions.

    Certainly better controllers that don't cook themselves will be nice.

    If the capability is there, and there is some benefit, they will utilize the drive speed. Even if it means the massive games 4 or 5 years from now just load faster. But I suspect the efforts will be towards more true 4K AAA titles rather than upscaling. That means big textures and assets and the current trend is to keep those compressed until run time.
    Reply
  • USAFRet
    Justare said:
    I need this in my next gaming pc. When will motherboards include PCIe Gen 6 x4?
    Why? You do realize that drive speeds matters FAR less in game performance than just about everything else. Right?
    Reply