Micron unveils insanely fast 9200 PCIe NVMe SSD series with up to 11TB capacity

Solid state drives are all the rage nowadays, but as fast as they are, they don't often compare to mechanical hard drives from a capacity standpoint. Heck, my pricey MacBook Pro came with a very fast NVMe drive, but with a mere 256GB of storage. This is quite paltry when cheap laptops using a HDD can often exceed four times that capacity. Of course, there is a big speed tradeoff, making the smaller capacity preferable to some. It stinks that many consumers have to choose between a fast yet small SSD or a slow and roomy HDD.

What if consumers didn't have to choose though? A new NVMe SSD series from Micron, dubbed 9200, offers both extreme speed and monstrous capacity. How much storage, you ask? Up to 11TB! The drive is more focused for businesses, however, as it will likely be priced well out of reach of the average consumer. In other words, it isn't designed for your fancy gaming rig, but instead, servers. Still, it is exciting to think that these large capacity SSDs will trickle down to consumers eventually.

"The new Micron 9200 SSD is one of the first NVM Express (NVMe) SSD on the market with a capacity exceeding 10TB. Our Micron 9200 SSDs leverage the cost-effective capacity of 3D NAND combined with the proven throughput and response time of the NVMe protocol -- meeting the needs of storage-hungry use cases at an attractive cost per gigabyte. With the ability to access data at the speed and cost of the Micron 9200 SSD, organizations can experience true enterprise storage innovation," says Micron.

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The manufacturer further says, "Our Micron 9200 SSD Series offers three models that are uniquely designed to satisfy the varying degree of customer workloads. They are ideal for applications like database acceleration, high-frequency trading and financial services, and high-performance computing. The Micron 9200 SSDs come in capacities from 1.6TB to 11TB in traditional half-height, half-length as well as hot-swappable U.2 form factors."

Micron shares the following key benefits and specifications below.

• Accelerate applications and unlock the value of data transfer with transfer speeds up to 5.5 GB/s and read IOPS up to 900k (steady state).
• Optimize existing infrastructure with purpose-built, easy-to-deploy flash solutions in industry-standard capacities up to 11TB.
• Get peace of mind with solid data protection thanks to the Micron 9200 SSD’s full enterprise end-to-end data path protection, power-loss protection, and secure signed firmware.
• Reduce cost/IOPS compared to a typical HDD thanks to the Micron 9200 SSD’s NVMe technology.
• Meet workload requirements with our Flex Capacity™ feature that allows you to tune and re-tune the drive’s capacity to deliver application and workload-optimized performance.

These drool-worthy drives will be available for purchase at the end of this month, so if you work in IT and think this could benefit your company, now is the time to start working on your pitch to the person in charge of spending. Cost is unknown at this time, but expect them to be quite pricey.