WD and Samsung have only just jumped on the PCIe 5.0 gaming SSD bandwagon, but the next generation of super-fast drives is already waiting in the wings. A new PCIe 6.0 SSD from Micron has just been demonstrated at the Computex tradeshow in Taiwan, and its potential speeds are immense.
Of course, none of the Micron tech makes it into your gaming rig. Even so, it's cool to see the tech that could be used in the top-speed SSDs of tomorrow this far in advance.
Called the Micron 9650 Pro, the new SSD is currently at the third engineering validation test (EVT3) stage, and it was spotted by Tom's Hardware at the Astera Labs booth at Computex, where it was being used to demonstrate the company's new PCIe 6.0 switch.
Micron has already demonstrated an early PCIe 6.0 SSD designed for the data center market, which ran at immense sequential read speeds of 26GB/s in 2024. However, as Tom's Hardware points out, there's potential here for a drive that runs at up to 30.25GB/s if it pushes the 4x PCIe 6.0 interface to its limit – twice the current speed limit of today's PCIe 5.0 drives, such as the Samsung 9100 Pro, both of which get close to saturating the full bandwidth of the PCIe 5.0 bus.
This early drive isn't a standard M.2 card that you could put in a desktop gaming PC, but is instead built inside a metal case that's then connected to a PCIe 6.0 card – I also love the fact that it's held in place with sticky tape in the demonstration photos, showing that this really is an early look at the tech.
It's going to take a while before we see this kind of super-fast storage installed in the best gaming PCs as standard, but in the meantime you can check out our guide to the how to install an SSD as well.
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