Micron has a new M.2 NVMe SSD, this time at PCIe Gen5 speeds. The Micron 4600 SSD is built for speed and reasonable capacity. What is interesting here is that this is a client SSD and it is being sold by Micron not Crucial. That means this is going to be a drive found more commonly in OEM systems.
Micron 4600 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD Launched
Micron says that its new SSD is fast. It is interesting to see the 38% “Better user experience” based on PCMark 10 versus Gen4 NVMe SSDs. I cannot say I have ever thought a Gen5 SSD upgrade gave me that much more performance.
Here are the quick specs. It looks like the 512GB drive, which will be common in OEM systems, is “only” rated at 10.3GB/s read and just under 5.8GB/s write. We say “only” because that is still very fast. Getting to the 1TB capacity bumps the read speeds up to 14.5GB/s and the 2TB capacity gives us a maximum of 12GB/s writes. Also, hitting 2.1M 4K random read IOPS and over 1M random write IOPs is very good. That used to be the domain of a higher-end storage array and it is now in a simple M.2 SSD.
Micron’s new drive at 4TB is the largest of its client M.2 offerings. It is using TLC NAND, not QLC to get to that capacity as well.
It feels like we have had PCIe Gen5 platforms for some time, but apparently, now Micron is ready with a M.2 offering.
Final Words
Our sense is that we will start to see these in some of the workstations we review this year. Those often have SK hynix, Samsung, or Micron SSDs in them that are OEM models rather than ones that you would commonly find at retail. Hopefully we get one of these that we can test out, and hopefully that is a 2TB or 4TB size drive.
It seems like PCIe Gen5 platforms have been around for a while, but Micron has finally announced their M.2 offering.