Micron recently introduced its 2650 client SSD, the first to be manufactured with 276-layer 3D NAND, a new record for the company.
Gen 9 NAND delivers the industry’s fastest I/O speeds at 3.6GBps, which Micron claims is 50% faster than competing NAND in an SSD and with up to 99% better read and 88% better write bandwidth. It’s also 73% denser and has up to 28% smaller wafer area compared to competing products.
The TLC (3-bit/cell) 2650 SSD uses a PCIe gen 4 interface and comes in an M.2 memory form factor, available in 2230, 2242, and 2280 sizes, and in capacities ranging from 256GB to 1TB.
Impressive results
To see how the promising newcomer fared, City of touch-ups We tested the SSD 2650 against a variety of competitors, including products from Crucial, Sabrent, Corsair, Western Digital, and Seagate, using a wide selection of benchmarking tools.
The site notes before testing that “Being a client or OEM SSD comes with some disadvantages when it comes to performance comparisons between it and retail SSDs. This is because client SSDs, in general, are configured differently than retail DIY SSDs. OEM or client SSDs are primarily intended for pre-built systems where the end user, for the most part, will never even see or touch the SSD.”
Performance in the tests varied for the SSD 2650, but it performed well in the PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark, the test City of touch-ups described as the one that “traditionally brings DRAM-less SSDs to their knees.” It was only beaten by Crucial/Micron’s 2TB P310 with a QLC N58R array, currently the highest-performing retail DRAM-less SSD, but it performed better than it in other tests.
If you want to see exactly how well the SSD 2650 compares to the other drives, including Samsung's 990 EVO, you'll have to check out the full benchmark results, but City of touch-ups He sums it up beautifully by stating: “Micron’s 1TB 2650 OEM/Client SSD isn’t the ‘fastest’ of its kind, but it’s certainly the most powerful of its kind, and in fact, is the fifth most powerful flash-based PCIe Gen4 SSD ever made.”
Perhaps most excitingly, the site concludes: “It also gives us an introduction to a new 9th generation of high-speed NAND that brings with it the promise of 4-channel SSDs capable of 14GB/s throughput, vastly improved AI infrastructure scalability, and the speed needed to fully utilize PCIe Gen6 as it comes into play.”
