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Micron Announces New 2600 NVMe SSD With Adaptive Write Technology and G9 QLC NAND

GFreeman

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SSDs are vital to enhancing user experience and system performance for PCs and client devices. Micron Technology, Inc. today announced the Micron 2600 NVMe SSD, a value client storage solution designed for OEMs. Built with the industry's first 9th-generation QLC NAND in an SSD, the 2600 SSD features Micron's innovative Adaptive Write Technology (AWT) to deliver exceptional PCIe Gen 4 performance with QLC economics. The Micron 2600 SSD achieves up to 63% faster sequential write and 49% faster random write speeds than competing value QLC and TLC SSDs, offering a best-in-class user experience for demanding client users.

"The Micron 2600 QLC SSD achieves superior performance compared to competitive value TLC drives," said Mark Montierth, corporate vice president and general manager of the Mobile and Client Business Unit at Micron Technology. "Micron's unparalleled combination of high-performance G9 NAND and innovative Adaptive Write Technology unlocks the performance previously only considered possible with TLC drives and is in qualification with Micron's OEM customers. This Micron innovation milestone allows for broader commercial adoption of QLC NAND."



Optimized QLC NAND performance
Micron AWT improves the write performance of QLC NAND by delivering an industry-first multi-tiered SLC, TLC and QLC dynamic caching architecture to improve sequential write speeds. Improved write performance provides up to four times faster sequential write speeds while continuously writing up to 800 GB of data to a 2 TB SSD.

The cutting-edge six-plane NAND architecture of Micron's 2 Tb G9 QLC NAND allows for higher degrees of parallelism and increases read and write commands issued to the NAND simultaneously to improve performance. With speeds up to 3.6 GB/s, the 2600 SSD offers the fastest NAND I/O rate now shipping in a client SSD.

Storage matters
Powerful PC storage solutions enable improved application productivity and optimized user experience. The Micron 2600 SSD transforms everyday computing experiences, significantly boosting productivity for commonly used applications.
  • Enhanced performance: The 2600 SSD accelerates data access, along with read and write speeds, leading to quicker boot times, faster application launch time and enhanced system responsiveness. Reduced OS image installation time ensures more efficient manufacturing process and fast commercial PC drive imaging for IT departments.
  • AI PC applications: Storage performance is a key contributor to advancements in AI-driven applications. The 2600 SSD's fast read access allows AI models to be loaded quickly, enabling seamless transitions between tasks.
  • User experience: AWT helps ensure active data is optimally stored in the SSD, resulting in smoother performance for content creation, casual gaming and everyday computing. In PCMark 10 testing, the 2600 SSD achieved up to 44% better scoring and 43% better bandwidth versus competitive value TLC SSDs, helping demonstrate the excellent user experience provided by the 2600 SSD.

The Micron 2600 NVMe SSD is now shipping to OEMs globally in 22x30 mm, 22x42 mm, and 22x80 mm form factors, with capacities ranging from 512 GB to 2 TB. The variation of smaller form factors, capacity options and a single-sided design is perfect for handhelds, ultra-thin laptops and workstations. For example, the compact 2 TB, 22x30 mm form factor is ultra-small and high-capacity for use in limited-space designs such as handheld gaming devices.



View at TechPowerUp Main Site | Source
 
Sounds promising, but no mention of larger sizes, so whazzupppwitdat ?
 
This is why I really like Micron. If I'm looking for SSD, I'm either looking for Micron (Crucial) drive or Samsung. I wish they'd also make controllers themselves for their own drives, but I guess reliable NAND counts too. And their SSD's have always been highly reliable for very fair price with no shenanigans like some other brands like to do (send gold samples to reviewers and then sell crappier versions in stores).
 
I noticed the specs don’t list write power.
 
Sounds promising, but no mention of larger sizes, so whazzupppwitdat ?
Anyone serious about larger sizes is serious about avoiding the trash that is QLC.
 
@GerKNG I'm learning from your mistakes, and never buying QLC. If I remember right, a long time ago you said literally all your QLC drives are dead after minimal use.
 
Anyone serious about larger sizes is serious about avoiding the trash that is QLC.
Yea, but if they can "optimize" QLC significantly, just imagine what they could do for TLC if they wanted to......
 
It's as if we reached a technological wall that won't allow anything past 2TB to become the mainstream sweet spot. In 2021, 2TB was already the hard limit for many drives on the market. I was hoping that 4TB would have been accessible under 200$ by now...
 
@GerKNG I'm learning from your mistakes, and never buying QLC. If I remember right, a long time ago you said literally all your QLC drives are dead after minimal use.
Weird because I've had a 2TB QLC drive (Sabrent Rocket Q) for 4 years........and its doing just fine not dead at all.
 
Weird because I've had a 2TB QLC drive (Sabrent Rocket Q) for 4 years........and its doing just fine not dead at all.
Is it the boot device in a regularly used computer?
I see no issue w/ QLC in a 'Fast Flash Drive' or Games/Storage drive, but would caution using one for a boot drive.

I've got a Sabrent Rocket Q4 1TB that came used as part of a lot. It's still alive today, but is infrequently used as an external storage device.


Regardless, QLC is less reliable and more-susceptible to certain failure modes (thermal- and power- related).
 
Yes its been in a tiger lake laptop since 2021,
 
Seriously, what's with the 2TB limitation for those nVme SSDs ?? The capacity haven't gone beyond 2-4TB for 10 years now. How is this possible??
We have 2TB microSD cards now, with 4TB microSD plans to be released later this year or next year, while the nvme SSDs are still stuck on the 2, maximum 4TB sizes???
What gives??
 
All I want is a cheap SATA 16TB drive for my backup stuff, so I can finally be done with the spinning rust.
 
Weird because I've had a 2TB QLC drive (Sabrent Rocket Q) for 4 years........and its doing just fine not dead at all.

It depends on the use case. I use on purpose DRAM for writing files to reduce "lint files" and to reduce writes to storage. NVME are too slow for that task anyway.

do they really think I will leave an expensive 2TB drive empty? That marketing looks like awesome for a fresh empty drive. I expect worse performance as the budget Crucial P5 Plus 1TB drive.

SSD gave me the impression no performance degradation. I had to use defragmentation on HDDs quite often. It seems we are back as in the hold HDD days, slow performance and software overhead to get a bit of performance back. That does not work with advanced filesystem and / or with encryption and / or other software in between. It is not recommended to mark an encrypted block "in use".

Crucial sold me several different SATA SSDs and DDR4 kits which were high quality. I hope they do not ruin it with a bad product.

Samsung, people advertise for SAMSUNG storage quality, when I saw over the years bug after bug after bug on their storage. The SAMSUNG drives with issues is quite long. Just by reading news sites and forum i see bad samsung drives one after another over the years.
 
And? There is no hurry to make super high capasity SSDs for the consumer sector. Why? Because 20+TB hard drives exist, perform well and are very reliable. SSDs for OS/Boot functionality is the primary focus. That dynamic is not shifting quickly because it doesn't need to.
 
And? There is no hurry to make super high capasity SSDs for the consumer sector. Why? Because 20+TB hard drives exist, perform well and are very reliable. SSDs for OS/Boot functionality is the primary focus. That dynamic is not shifting quickly because it doesn't need to.
The annoying thing is that SSD manufacturers did what was necessary to slow, or even increase the GB/€. Sharp decline in 2023, but then they said "oupps, we can't have that, even for a SATA SSD who have pretty much peaked in write/read performance for a decade. Let's slow things down so that they don't become too much of a good deal. " A 4TB SATA SSD is sold at the same price as a 4TB Gen 4 NVMe.

Wether it's external or internal storage, the trend is the same: sharp decline from 2021 to 2023, then fairly steady prices from mid 2023 to 2025.
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Of course. Business' are in business to be in business. Making money is not wrong or evil. Duh.
I just wish that they could have at least let the SATA version drop more in price. It's a bit insane to think that a drive 10 times faster is sold for the same price :D
 
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