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Just over two months ago we posted a report on a brand new SSD that we believed might take the industry by storm… if it ever made its way to retail, client or enterprise sales that is. We say this as there have been so many SSDs that reviewers have had in their hands over the years that never made it to release. This SSD was an engineering sample of a new PCIe 5.0 Silicon Motion SM2508 controller, and it was great to see. Up until this point, Gen 5 SSDs spoke to the success of Phison with their PS5026-E26 SSD controller for the most part. Both controllers achieve greatness as they do something not seen before; they reach 14GB/s data transfer speeds with up to 2 million IOPS. In laymen’s terms, they are the Bugatti’s of storage transfer. Competition is great and our previous review is a great reference to today’s report, and posted here.
Today we have a new Micron release on the bench, the Micron 4600 Gen 5 2TB NVMe and guess what controller is in that SSD? You got it; the SMI SM2508 we reported on previously. This release comes with good news and bad news for some. The good news is that it is available for purchase and already going into new manufacturers products. The bad news is that it is not available as a retail Crucial release just yet, but we are certain this is only a matter of time as this SSD is going to achieve great things.
The Micron 4600 is a PCIe 5.0 (Gen5) x4 (4-lane) M.2 2280 form factor (22mm wide x 80mm long) SSD that utilizes the latest NVMe 2.0 protocol. It is available to manufacturers in capacities of 512GB, 1, 2 and 4TB. I’d give anything to have a 4TB in hand as that SSD would quickly become my permanent system SSD. Performance specifications speak to up 14.5GB/s read and 12GB/s write data transfer speeds with up to 2.1 million IOPS for the 2/4TB capacities, and these specs drop just a bit for the 512GB and 1TB versions.
The beauty of the Micron 4600 is exactly what we see in this above picture; it is single-sided. It has 8,250mW active read power with <150 mW active idle power and <3.5 sleep/PS4 power which almost makes us believe the Micron 6400 will be in laptops and ultrabooks soon enough. Don’t get us wrong, we can heat this up quite easily with our test regimen, but then again, not many would be pushing it quite as we do in their laptop. The Micron 4600 has a 3-year limited warranty and it has 300TBW for the 512GB version, 600TBW (1TB), 1200TBW (2TB) and 1600TBW for the 4TB version.
The Micron 4600 Gen 5 SSD is built on the Silicon Motion SM2508 Gen 5 8-channel NVMe SSD controller, two pieces of 3600MT/s Micron G9 TLC NAND flash memory and a DRAM cache chip on a black 2280 PCB (printed circuit board). It has hardware-based AES 256-bit encryption, end-to-end power loss protection, host-controlled thermal management which kicks in when the SSD hits 60°C, performance enhancing accelerated caching, and supports TCG Opal 2.02 and TCG Pyrite 2.01.
Let’s check out the performance…