Micron Shows World’s Fastest SSD
At DesignCon 2025 in California in late February, Micron and Astera Labs demonstrated the first-ever PCIe 6.0 SSD. The E3.S device was tested in combination with Astera Labs’ Scorpio PCIe 6.0 chip and Nvidia’s H100 AI accelerator.
The official test data was only published this week on the Astera Labs blog. During the tests, as Tom’s Hardware reports, the SSD demonstrated sequential read speeds of over 27 GB/s on each drive, surpassing the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs. Interestingly, in August of last year, Micron announced this drive as the industry’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, claiming read speeds of 26 GB/s. However, testing on the Astera Labs rig exceeded those expectations, with read speeds reaching 27.14 GB/s for each of the two SSDs in the test system. By comparison, the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSD tested, the Crucial T705, maxed out at 14.5 GB/s, which is only half of Micron’s new record.
Joint testing by Micron and Astera Labs confirms that the new interface is ready to deliver significant speedups, which is especially important in the context of increasing demand for high data transfer speeds. This breakthrough opens up new possibilities for enterprise and consumer solutions, delivering significant performance improvements and opening new horizons for the industry.
