Micron 9300 NVMe SSD Launched

Boasting high-performance sequential read/ write as well as “the lowest average write latency on the market” for 4K QD1 writes, the Micron 9300 NVMe SSD is the company’s flagship data center SSD. Starting at capacities from 3.2TB and ranging up to 15.36TB, all of the drives are listed as supporting up to 3.5GB/s sequential read and 3.1GB/s to 3.5GB/s sequential write speeds making these thoroughly high-performance NVMe SSDs.

Micron 9300 NVMe SSD

There are two different flavors of the Micron 9300 NVMe SSD. The Micron 9300 Pro ranges in capacities from 3.84TB to 15.36TB in capacity and the company says it is a read-intensive offering. The Micron 9300 Max is a mixed-use 3DWPD offering that ranges from 3.2TB to 12.8TB in capacity. A few generations ago, read-intensive even at under 2TB was defined in the 0.3DWPD range so the Micron 9300 Pro at larger capacities and 1DWPD is quite intriguing. For reference, very few hard drives saw even close to 1DWPD at these capacities. Years ago STH did a survey by buying used SSDs and found that they were not getting written to nearly that much. See Used enterprise SSDs: Dissecting our production SSD population

In a market with many exotic solutions such as RAM-based NVMe devices and Intel Optane, we are slightly surprised to see Micron claim the lowest latency NVMe solution. With large RAM caches, it is certainly possible to get solid write performance with NAND and Micron is claiming 11µs 4K write QD1 latency which is low. The Intel DC P4610 3.2TB SSD, for example, claims around 18µs write latency. This is certainly an interesting space.

Micron 9300 NVMe SSD Key Specs

Here is the key specs table for the new NVMe SSDs: