Micron Announces Shipment of Industry’s Largest Capacity SSD 6600 ION

Micron has begun global shipment of the 6600 ION, a commercial solid-state drive that holds the record for highest capacity in its class. The company announced the launch on May 5, marking the start of deliveries for the 245TB variant. This release positions Micron to address the growing storage demands of modern data centers driven by artificial intelligence workloads.

The 6600 ION utilizes Micron's G9 276L 3D QLD NAND technology to achieve its massive 245.76TB storage capacity. It is available in both U.2 and EDSFF E3.L form factors to suit different server architectures. The drive delivers sequential read speeds of 13.7GB/s and sequential write speeds of 3GB/s. Random performance reaches 1780K IOPS for reads and 42K IOPS for writes.

Micron states that the 6600 ION consumes only 30W of power, which is half the power required by hard disk drives with equivalent capacity. The EDSFF E3.L version saves 82% of rack space compared to traditional hard drives of the same storage size. Endurance ratings vary by workload type, offering 1.0 SDWPD for 128KB sequential writes, 0.3 RDWPD for 16KB random writes, and 0.075 RDWPD for 4KB random writes.

Jeremy Werner, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Micron's Core Data Center Business, highlighted the shift in data center storage market share from hard drives to solid-state drives. He noted that AI workloads are driving a surge in shared data volumes. The high capacity of the 6600 ION provides operators with a means to improve rack-level total cost of ownership, especially as power supply becomes a constraint for AI infrastructure expansion.