Micron Ships Gigantic 245TB SSD

Source: Slashdot

Micron launches 245 TB SSD for AI infrastructure

Micron announced that it is now shipping the 6600 ION, a 245 TB solid‑state drive (SSD) marketed toward AI infrastructure, hyperscalers, and cloud providers coping with rapid data growth.

Capacity and power

• Capacity: 245 TB in a single 2.5‑inch drive.
• Power consumption: Roughly 30 W, about half the draw of comparable hard‑drive (HDD) setups.
• Rack reduction: Micron claims the SSD can cut rack counts by 82 percent versus HDD deployments offering similar raw capacity, while also lowering cooling requirements.

Performance and efficiency

• Micron touts up to 84 times better energy efficiency for AI workloads compared with HDD‑based systems.
• The drive delivers dramatically lower latency than traditional HDD solutions.

Industry implications

• The announcement underscores a growing pressure on spinning disks in the enterprise market.
• Although HDDs still dominate bulk storage due to lower cost per terabyte, SSD capacities are encroaching on territory once exclusive to HDDs.
• While a quarter‑petabyte SSD is not yet destined for home NAS devices, its existence signals that such capacities are moving out of the realm of science fiction.