For years, Quad-level cell (QLC) NVMe data center solid-state drives (SSDs) have faced a common issue—insufficient specifications that prevent large-scale applications from being realized. Users search for budget SSDs, but QLC technology sacrifices performance, durability, and power efficiency, making SSDs a less attractive deal. In short, their value is not high. However, Micron Semiconductor has addressed this data center SSD issue with an innovative breakthrough.
Micron Semiconductor announced the shipment of the world's first 200+ layers SSD1—Micron 6500 ION SSD. By leveraging Micron's long-standing NAND layer leadership, it overcomes many shortcomings of competitors' QLC SSDs, ultimately combining QLC value with Triple-Level Cell (TLC) technology performance. This innovation follows Micron's previous achievements: launching the world's first 176-layer data center SSD a year ago, the first 176-layer QLC SSD, and the first QLC SSD specifically designed for data center use five years ago. As the product manager for the first QLC SSD, the author has unique insight into the intriguing story behind the origin of the Micron 6500 ION SSD. This story dates to May 21, 2018, when Micron Semiconductor introduced its first ION drive, the Micron 5210, marking a new chapter in QLC-level technology.
When Micron Semiconductor first introduced QLC technology, there was global excitement about the potential leap in technology and the opportunity to achieve higher capacity, lower-cost SSDs. However, customers naturally raised concerns about the hidden costs of adopting QLC data center SSDs. While QLC technology did save them costs on drive purchasing prices, the complexity of cell programming led some customers to ultimately bear higher operating costs. Therefore, competitors' QLC SSDs are at least 20% lower in all specifications compared to equivalent products based on TLC technology and have 10-20 times lower specs in all areas except sequential reads. As QLC technology matures and future SSDs and storage systems are designed to optimize the higher capacity uniquely provided by QLC, the disadvantages of QLC technology in today's data centers will become less important. However, most current data centers are not designed to address the challenges of QLC SSDs, so customers must ask themselves key questions: "What am I paying for and what am I getting? Does what I get meet my needs?" If the answer is yes, they will make a purchase.
During the four-year lifespan of the original QLC product, Micron Semiconductor found that many customers were willing to make compromises, especially when replacing traditional 10,000 RPM hard disk drives (HDDs). Their April 2020 press release demonstrated this, as most OEMs worldwide endorsed their QLC products for this purpose. Although strong adoption was observed, Micron Semiconductor wondered if it were possible to help customers save costs on a larger scale—if they could find a way to reduce QLC's initial costs in the data center while also lowering operating and cooling costs, what would happen?
This "What if we could?" question led to the birth of the Micron 6500 ION SSD. It offers the cost savings and capacity expansion that customers love about QLC. At the same time, it reduces power consumption by 20% while providing higher performance and durability, addressing customers' long-standing concerns about QLC. With the ability to sequentially write 30TB of data per day (one sequential drive write per day) and randomly write 9TB of data per day (0.3 random drive writes per day), the 6500 ION eliminates previous QLC durability issues. Its durability at 0.3 RDWPD is higher than a 1 DWPD 7.68TB standard SSD.2
This is a massive paradigm shift—exactly what Micron Semiconductor aimed for. Since the launch of the world's first QLC SSD, their mission has been to continuously raise standards and create the world's best data center SSD value—whether the NAND within is TLC or QLC. They are not partial to specific technologies, but rather passionate about solving customer problems, such as reducing total storage costs. By expanding NAND layer counts more rapidly, Micron Semiconductor can ultimately offer a more sustainable cost structure compared to competitors' QLC SSDs—without the compromises customers have experienced in the past. The interest they see from many of the world's largest data center customers proves this.
Advantages of Micron 6500 ION SSD compared to competitors' 30.72TB QLC SSD for users:
34% improvement in average read latency3; 58% increase in sequential write speed4; Up to 62% more 4KB random read IOPS5; More than a 30-fold increase in 4KB random write IOPS6; 10 times greater 4KB random write lifespan, improving durability and flexibility7; Future security feature set: OCP 2.0, NVMe 2.0, NVMe-MI 1.2b, SRIS, etc.; Industry-leading security features (FIPS, SPDM 1.2, SHA-512, etc.); Achieving all the above advantages while saving 20% active power consumption (20W vs 25W); Supply chain security assurance: multiple manufacturing sites and Trade Agreements Act (TAA) compliant SKUs; Easy network saturation:8; Two drives occupy all resources of 50GbE; Three drives occupy all resources of 100GbE; Seven drives occupy all resources of 200GbE; Thirteen drives occupy all resources of 400GbE.
Micron 6500 ION's goal: Offer all the benefits of TLC with none of the compromises associated with QLC NVMe data center SSDs.
When deploying workloads with continuously expanding capacity demands, such as object storage, general-purpose cloud storage, all-flash arrays, software-defined storage (SDS) capacity tier, NoSQL databases, content delivery networks, and AI/ML data lakes, consider trying the Micron 6500 ION.