Micron has officially confirmed that the new 9550 NVMe SSD is being prepared to serve data centers worldwide, with significant improvements over the last generations.
This new drive offers industry-leading performance of 14GBps sequential reads and 10GBps sequential writes which is about 67% faster than competing products while the 3,300K/400KIOPS random reads and writes make it as compelling in stuff like AI workloads of LLMs and GNNs.
Speaking of GNNs, the 9550 SSD is now up to 33% faster in workload completion as well as 60% quicker feature aggregation in GNN training with ig Accelerator Memory (BaM) and delivers up to 34% higher throughput for NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage. The power efficiency game is showing some dominant trends as well:
- Up to 43% lower SSD average power and a 29% reduction in overall system energy usage during GNN training with BaM
- Up to 81% less SSD energy per 1TB transferred with NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage
- Up to 35% less SSD energy and 13% less system energy usage with MLPerf
- Up to 21% less SSD energy usage during Llama LLM training fine-tuning with Microsoft DeepSpeed
Boasting the NVMe 2.0 protocol, Micron also offers the drive in other standards such as OCP 2.0/2.5 for greater flexibility and simplifying large-scale deployment. It also has end-to-end security features including Self-Encrypting Drive (SED), full compliance with Security Protocols and Data Models (SPDM 1.2) as well as optional FIPS 140-3 Level 2 and TAA compliance.
Capacities-wise, Micron will be shipping sizes from 3.2TB to 30.72TB, and in U.2, E1.S, and E3.S form factors. The sampling phase is happening as of now on a global scale and will soon be available for quotations and purchase.
