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Industry-Leading 245 TB Micron 6600 ION Data Center SSD Now Shipping
“AI workloads are driving massive growth in shared data, continuing the shift of data center storage share from HDDs toward SSDs. With 245 TB in a single SSD, the Micron 6600 ION makes solid state storage the clear choice for modern data centers,” said Jeremy Werner, senior vice president and general manager of Micron’s Core Data Center Business Unit. “This breakthrough capacity gives data center operators a critical new lever to improve rack-level total cost of ownership, especially as power availability becomes a defining constraint for AI infrastructure scale.”
“Rapid AI dataset growth is shifting storage economics from individual drives to rack-level efficiency,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president of solid state drives and enabling technologies at IDC. “Operators need more usable capacity per rack while staying within strict power and cooling constraints. Micron’s 245 TB drives deliver the density required to scale AI data pipelines without increasing data center footprints. Predictable performance, energy efficiency and higher capacity are essential to building cost-effective AI infrastructure.”
New economics for data center storage at quarter-petabyte scale
The 245 TB Micron 6600 ION SSD is available in both U.2 and E3.L form factors for massive storage capacity. The smaller physical footprint and increased capacity per drive enables operational and data center management simplicity and reduces failure points and maintenance needs.
Power consumption is equally transformative. The 245 TB Micron 6600 ION SSD consumes up to 30 watts (W) at maximum power, only half the power consumed of a comparable-capacity HDD deployment. Additionally, these energy efficiency gains can support data center sustainability initiatives by helping reduce energy usage, cooling requirements and carbon emissions—key priorities for global operators under increasing environmental and cost pressures.
“AI workloads are pushing data center capacity to the limit, and when you can fit significantly more storage into every rack, the math changes: less power, less floor space, less operational overhead,” said Travis Vigil, senior vice president, ISG product management, Dell Technologies. “That’s what 245 TB drives in Dell storage systems for AI will deliver. It’s a meaningful reduction in total cost of ownership for customers building out AI and large-scale data center environments.”
Setting new performance and efficiency benchmarks for sustainable scale
The Micron 6600 ION SSD is built to support extreme-capacity deployments demonstrating superior AI workload performance and energy efficiency at scale versus data centers utilizing HDDs. Testing in Micron labs demonstrates dramatic gains in energy efficiency, throughput and latency versus HDD‑based systems:
- For AI workloads: The 245 TB Micron 6600 ION provided up to 84 times better energy efficiency, 8.6 times faster AI preprocessing and 3.4 times better ingest throughput, with up to 29 times lower latency.
- Object storage workloads: The 245 TB Micron 6600 ION demonstrated up to 435 times better throughput per watt, 96 times faster time to first byte and 58 times better aggregate throughput.
At scale, 1.9 times more energy is required for an HDD deployment versus 245 TB Micron 6600 ION SSDs in a 1EB deployment. These at-scale energy efficiency gains can translate into measurable sustainability impacts, such as:
- CO2 savings equivalent to the amount of CO2 absorbed by over 9,000 mature trees per year
- 438 metric tons (MT) per year of CO2 reduction
- 921 megawatt-hours (MWh) per year of energy saved
- HVAC cooling savings of over 3.14 billion British thermal units (Btu) per year
The Micron 6600 ION 245 TB SSD will be on display in the Micron booth (#226) at Dell Tech World, May 18 – 21, 2026. Stop by to see the Micron 6600 ION in a 40-slot Dell PowerEdge server optimized for data lake storage.
