Micron has achieved a significant milestone in storage technology by entering mass production of its 9650 NVMe SSD, making it the first PCIe Gen 6 data center drive to reach this stage. The drive, which was first unveiled in July 2025, delivers sequential read speeds of up to 28 GB/s, double the performance of PCIe Gen 5 drives. The 9650 features Micron's proprietary G9 TLC NAND, custom SSD controller ASIC, DRAM, and validated firmware.

The drive's performance metrics show substantial gains across all metrics: sequential write speeds reach 14 GB/s, random read performance hits 5.5 million IOPS, and random write achieves 900,000 IOPS. These represent 100%, 40%, 67%, and 22% improvements over Gen 5 respectively. At a 25-watt power state, the drive offers double the performance of PCIe Gen 5 options, with sequential read efficiency of 1,120 MB/s per watt and random read efficiency of 220 KIOPS per watt.

The 9650 supports both air-cooled and liquid-cooled configurations, addressing the thermal challenges of higher performance densities in modern data centers. After 18 months of interoperability testing across the PCIe Gen 6 ecosystem, Micron is now qualifying the drive with OEM and AI data center customers for deployment in AI training and inference workloads, particularly for large language models and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines.