Six months after launching its 7400 PCIe gen 4 Enterprise SSD, Micron has released a lower latency, faster, and higher capacity 7450 line in the same M.2, U.3, and E1.S form factors as well as Max and Pro variants.
The new 7450 uses Micron’s 176-layer 3D NAND, set in TLC (3bits/cell) format, like the 7400’s 96-layer flash.
Jeremy Werner, corporate VP and GM of Micron’s Storage Business Unit, issued a statement, saying: “We’re launching the Micron 7450 SSD at the same time PCIe Gen4 is becoming the most widely adopted SSD interface in servers. This product… brings consistent, reliable latencies below 2 milliseconds, critical to enabling quality of service in scale-out data centre workloads.”
A table shows how the 7450’s performance compares to that of the 7400. We have emboldened all the 7450 numbers higher than the equivalent 7400 numbers to bring out the differences:
In some cases, such as the 7400 Pro U.3 and 7400 Max M.2, maximum capacity has doubled to 15.36TB and 6.4TB respectively with the equivalent 7450 models. The 7.68TB capacity for the 7450 Pro E1.S is claimed to be industry-leading. Sequential read and write performance has improved over the 7400 for all the 7450 models while all random read and write IOPS numbers have also improved, except for the 7450 Max and Pro U.3 variants.
Quality of Service (QoS) latency shows how many read/write operations can be completed within a unit of time. Micron’s internal 7450 testing shows 2ms or lower latency in 6×9 (six nines), and QoS latency below QD 32 for the Micron 7450 SSD at 15.36TB, which it says aligns to common data centre workload queue depth (QD) for a broad variety of applications.
Put another way, the 7450 has latency at or below 2ms for 99.9999 per cent QoS in common, mixed, random workloads. This makes databases such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL, RocksDB, Cassandra, and Aerospike faster.
It also supports Meta’s Open Compute Project (OCP). Ross Stenfort, a hardware systems engineer at Meta, said: “The Micron 7450 [has] support for the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification and E1.S with 8TB in a compact form factor. These specifications enable improved thermals, performance and simplified management at scale.”
The 7450 U.3 products come in both 15mm and 7mm thicknesses and support 2.5-inch NVMe drives with their 7mm thickness. Security measures include a Secure Execution Environment (SEE) with dedicated security processing hardware with physical isolation, dedicated memory, secure code, and a security processing engine.
The 7450 is a fast replacement for the 7400 and advances its abilities in terms of capacity, latency, IOPS and bandwidth, while retaining the same endurance of 3 Drive Writes per Day (DWPD) for the Max and 1 DWPD for the Pro models.
The 7450 products are sample shipping to customers now with general availability set for later this year.
