The next SSDs may be over 80% faster

By Monica J. White August 6, 2024

Micron just announced an important milestone: It’s working on the world’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, and it sure looks like it’s going to offer blisteringly fast speeds. Micron promises to deliver sequential read bandwidths of over 26GB/s — quite a feat, considering that the fastest SSDs out right now max out at 14.5GB/s.

It’ll be a long time before any of us can own a 26GB/s SSD, though, because Micron’s new product is being made for data centers. It’s no wonder — the ever-pressing demand of AI and various high-performance computing (HPC) workloads make it so that these big developments are bound to end up in enterprise situations at first. However, the fact that the first PCIe 6.0 SSD is under development, and that it’s so incredibly fast, is good news for you and me, too.

Right now, PCIe 5.0 SSDs are readily available in stores, and we’ve seen the gradual rise in speeds as the technology is starting to mature. One of the fastest SSDs (if not the fastest) currently available to people like you and me is the Crucial T705, which hits read speeds of 14.5GB/s. That’s an 80% uplift between that SSD and what Micron is working on right now, and Micron promises to reach “over 26 GB/s,” so that gap could grow wider.

Thinking back to PCIe Gen3 certainly puts that 26GB/s number into perspective. PCIe 3.0 SSDs typically only went as high as 3.5GB/s.

Micron's GDDR7 VRAM. — Micron

Micron isn’t just ushering in new SSDs, though, because its upcoming GDDR7 memory is also on the horizon — and that will find its way to consumers a lot quicker. Rumor has it that Nvidia’s next-gen RTX 50-series will use GDDR7 memory, and Micron touts an up to 30% performance improvement in games between GDDR6 and GDDR7.

Micron’s upcoming SSD is an enigma right now. Outside of the promise regarding sequential read bandwidths, Micron is saving all the juicy scoop for its upcoming keynote during the Flash Memory Summit (FMS) 2024. It’s unclear how much will be revealed, or when this SSD will even land in the hands of Micron’s (very much enterprise-only) clients.

It’ll be a long time before you can buy an SSD of that caliber and install it in your PC. But one day, a few years from now, it’ll happen — and that’s pretty mind-blowing.

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Monica J. White

Computing Writer

Monica is a UK-based freelance writer and self-proclaimed geek. A firm believer in the "PC building is just like expensive…

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