The Micron 3610 NVMe SSD is the industry’s first PCIe Gen5 QLC client SSD, powered by Micron G9 NAND and offering significantly higher performance than PCIe Gen 4 drives.
The 3610 follows on from the prior 3400 and 3500 PCIe Gen 4 client SSDs. It’s built using Micron’s G9 276-layer 3D NAND, using a 2 Tb QLC die, and there are three capacity levels: 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB. It comes in three single-sided M.2 form factors: 2230, 2242, and 2280. The endurance is 400 TBW per TB and there is a 2 million hour MTTF rating.
Mark Montierth, SVP and GM of Micron’s Mobile and Client Business Unit, said: “The 3610 will enable ultra-thin devices that meet the growing demands of on-device AI, immersive streaming and performance-intensive workloads.”
The random and sequential performance is impressive:
Micron says the drive’s ONFI 5.0 interface supports speeds up to 3.6 GT/s, “ensuring high throughput for demanding workloads… It is capable of loading 20 billion-parameter AI models in less than three seconds.” The drive is envisioned as being used in lightweight, AI inference-capable notebooks and tablet computers.
It is a DRAM-less drive relying on a host memory buffer and host thermal management, and features DEVSLP low-power states, which improve performance per watt by 43 percent compared to Micron’s 3500 PCIe Gen 4 TLC drive.
The company says it’s “positioned between our premium Gen 5 4600 series and value-oriented Gen 4 offerings [and] the 3610 SSD delivers uncompromising performance, trusted reliability and clear value at scale.”
We expect Phison, Samsung, Sandisk/Kioxia, and SK hynix to follow Micron into the PCIe Gen 5, QLC drive market fairly quickly.
The 3610 SSD is sampling with select Micron OEM partners. Get the tech brief here.
