The difficulty in achieving greater densities in the E3.S form factor comes down to a few key challenges:

• Physical Space Constraints: The E3.S form factor is optimized for better airflow and thermal management compared to traditional 2.5-inch drives. Internal space for the E3.S is limited. This makes fitting more NAND flash packages and necessary control circuitry challenging without sacrificing heat management or performance.
• Thermal Management: High-density SSDs generate more heat, making dissipating in a compact form factor difficult. Effective heat dissipation is critical to maintaining performance and avoiding throttling, so balancing density with thermal solutions is a significant challenge.
• Power Consumption: As capacity increases, power requirements can also increase. Designing an E3.S drive that can support high capacity while staying within acceptable power and cooling limits for data center racks can be complicated.

While the E3.S drive stands out for its capacity and thin body, Micron offers an E1.L and U.2 drive. These form factors greatly expand Micron’s addressable market, servicing more traditional enterprise servers with U.2 bays and hyperscalers with E1.L. All drives feature a vertically integrated design, with Micron DRAM, NAND, controller, and in-house firmware stack.

Micron 6550 ION SSD Specifications

Micron 6550 ION Synthetic Performance Validation

With the Micron 6550 ION in the StorageReview Lab, we put the U.2 version of the drive through the paces inside a Dell PowerEdge R760 test platform. Micron included figures they measured in their lab, which we could validate in our testing, alongside the QLC-based Solidigm P5336 61.44TB SSD, the only widely shipping SSD available at this capacity point.

Along with the performance validation we performed on the Micron 6550 ION, we tested the power states to restrict the power consumed by the Micron 6550 ION. While all NVMe devices can be operated unrestricted (consuming up to 25W of power), NVMe SSDs support lowering the peak usage to save on power draw. Reducing power can significantly impact performance for some drives, but the Micron 6550 ION is optimized for lower power draw, offering data center performance within a smaller power envelope.

Before we started our performance tests, we put the Micron 6550 ION in PS1 mode and left the Solidigm P5335 in PS0 mode or unrestricted. The Micron 6550 ION supports eight power states (PS0 to PS7), which range from 25W max down to just 10W on the lower end. PS1 sets the maximum power draw on this SSD to 20W. By comparison, the Solidigm P5336 supports three power states (PS0 to PS2), which range from 25W to 10W in 5-10W increments.

Each SSD was put through a 128K sequential precondition workload for this performance comparison, where the drives were filled twice. When the precondition finished, the drives were tested for 128K sequential read and write performance while in the preconditioned state. The workload was then switched to a 16K random precondition for two drive fills, and the remaining 16K read and write tests were completed.

The Micron 6550 ION in our lab maintained alignment with the quoted Micron 6550 ION performance and, in some cases, exceeded Micron’s spec sheet.

In our 16K random read workload, the Micron 6550 ION maintained 11.6GB/s, compared to 7.4GB/s from the Solidigm P5536. In steady-state in the 16K random write workload, the Micron 6550 ION could offer 1.4GB/s, over 850MB/s from the P5336. Moving up to the 128K sequential read workload, the Micron 6550 ION measured 12.7GB/s, compared to 7.5GB/s from the Solidigm P5336. Switching to 128K sequential write, the Micron 6550 ION measured 8.2GB/s versus 3.2GB/s from the Solidigm P5336.

Comparing it to the Solidigm P5336, we noted many areas where the newer Gen5 interface on the Micron 6550 ION excelled over the Gen4 interface in the P5336, which is expected. The difference between Gen4 vs. Gen5 drives relates to how much bandwidth each drive can push across the wire. The Gen4 PCIe interface with four lanes of connectivity is capable of around 7GB/s, while the newer Gen5 PCI interface doubles that with 14GB/s. Micron’s use of TLC NAND gives it another design advantage over QLC-based competitors.

Micron 6550 ION AI Workload Performance

AI workloads have put a strain on administrators by demanding high-performing servers and superior energy efficiency. Micron positioned the 6550 ION against the Solidigm P5336 to showcase its capabilities using four distinct workloads: NVIDIA(R) Magnum IO(TM), Unet3D training and capture, and AI model checkpointing. The GPUDirect Storage (GDS) tests enable direct data transfer between storage and GPUs by bypassing CPU memory and reducing data movement overhead and latency.

Conclusion

The transition to Gen5 enterprise SSDs has provided server designers with greater flexibility than ever before when it comes to storage solutions. The E3.S form factor has unlocked new possibilities for extreme drive density: standard 1U servers can accommodate 20 E3.S SSDs, in contrast to the 8-10 U.2 drives they typically support. 2U servers benefit from similar advantages, capable of housing up to 32 (or more) E3.S SSDs compared to 24 in a U.2 configuration. Notably, some server vendors—Dell Technologies among them—have adopted E3.S as their sole option for Gen5 storage, making the expansion of the E3.S SSD ecosystem crucial.

 

 

In our initial performance testing, we set out to verify the performance claims Micron has made for the 6550 ION. A key highlight of the 6550 ION’s launch is its power-to-performance ratio. We constrained the Micron 6550 ION to PS1 (a maximum of 20W) and ran it through 16K random and 128K sequential workloads, pitting it against the Solidigm P5336 to gauge their relative performance. In the 128K sequential read test, we recorded 12.7GB/s on the 6550 ION, compared to 7.5GB/s on the Solidigm P5336. The TLC NAND in the Micron drive also delivers significant write performance advantages, which we observed in our 16K random write workload: the Micron 6550 ION achieved 84.5k IOPS, while the P5336 managed just 51.9k IOPS.

 

For this testing, we compared the Micron 6550 ION to the only 61.44TB SSD currently shipping widely—the Solidigm P5336. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, but that is precisely the point. Micron’s engineering team has figured out how to pack an impressive amount of NAND into a 7.5mm drive enclosure, all while prioritizing power efficiency, performance, and cost-effectiveness. This early performance preview has us eager to spend more time testing these drives to gain a clearer understanding of their performance across various applications.

 

Beijing Qianxing Jietong Technology Co., Ltd.
Sandy Yang/Global Strategy Director
WhatsApp / WeChat: +86 13426366826
Email: yangyd@qianxingdata.com
Website: www.qianxingdata.com/www.storagesserver.com

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