Micron's introduced the first PCIe 5 60 TB SSD and it could house 375 Stalker 2 installs, or even better, 35,294 Crab Champions installs
We've long recommended ensuring your drive is nice and large so you don't run out of space given seemingly ever-increasing game install sizes. Stalker 2, for instance, just had its install size upped to 160 GB in the latest system requirements. Oof.
And while 60 TB might be a bit much—we usually recommend a 2 TB SSD, or 1 TB if you're on a budget—that hasn't stopped Micron from unleashing the Micron ION 6550 into the world. This badboi is "the world’s fastest 60TB data center SSD and the industry’s first E3.S and PCIe Gen5 60TB SSD".
I'm being a little facetious with the "too much", of course, given this is clearly and explicitly an SSD intended for datacentres, not your humble gaming rig. And make no mistake, there were some absolute whoppers out there already in datacentre land, but none as fast as this one.
The ION 6650 can apparently transfer at 12 GB/s (read) using just 20 W of power. Unfortunately it only has a write speed of 5,000 MB/s, but I suppose datacentre storage often doesn't need to write as much as it reads.
Datacentre boffins are likely to be happy with its efficiency, too, since it's "the world’s first 60TB SSD with OCP 2.5 support, introducing the active state power management (ASPM). This new feature allows the drive to idle at 4 watts in the L1 state versus 5 watts in the L0 state, improving energy efficiency up to 20% when idling."
Myself, though, I'm interested in what this thing might be like in my gaming PC. On that front, the first thing worth noting is that it could hold a metric shit ton of games. Doing some quick math, I see the ION 6650 could host 375 Stalker 2 installs. Nice.
And judging by the 1.73 GB-worth of game files taken up by my most beloved indie title, Crab Champions, it could host 35,294 glorious copies of my favourite crustacean-based shooter. That's even nicer.
Given it's "available in E3.S, U.2, and E1.L form factors", and given you can pick up a U.2 to M.2 adapter for quite cheap, it's almost tempting to try it out. Alas, PCIe 5.0 adapters are hard to come by, so you'd have to nerf the drive down to 4.0 speeds when you drop it in your rig. Still, a man can dream.
Best SSD for gaming: The best speedy storage today.
Best NVMe SSD: Compact M.2 drives.
Best external hard drive: Huge capacities for less.
Best external SSD: Plug-in storage upgrades.