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QLC has been available in an SSD for sometime now, and as with TLC before it and MLC before that, it has experienced some growing pains. With every generation of memory comes the naysayers and haters that prefer to look back rather than forward. Luckily companies such as Micron look forward. The unfortunate reality, however, is that Micron has recently announced the closure of their Crucial consumer brand so you will never see what we are about to show you in a Crucial branded SSD. You will never see this SSD with a “Crucial” branded name on it.
The Micron 3610 was announced most recently at CES and has some big claims to its name. It speaks of Gen 5 performance with very low power consumption and being able to squeeze 4TB of memory into a ultra small 2230 (22mm wide x 30mm long) form factor for ultrabooks and similar compact devices. Let’s make no mistake though; this isn’t possible without QLC memory and more specifically, Micron’s own 276-layer G9 QLC NAND flash memory.
The Micron 3610 is a PCIe 5.0 (Gen5) four lane (x4) DRAMless SSD that relies on the NVMe 2.0 operating protocol. It is a client SSD available to original equipment manufacturers (oems) in 1, 2 and 4TB capacities. What is even more impressive is that we can squeeze that 4TB capacity in a 2230 (22mm wide x30mm long) form factor through use of Micron’s newest G9 QLC NAND. This SSD is available in 2242 as well as 2280 form factors and, in fact, we are testing the 2280 version in this report.
This is not the first we have seen of Micron’s G9 QLC NAND as it has met with alot of success as a Gen 4 SSD in the Micron Client 2600 that we reviewed some eight months back. There is not another low power Gen 5 DRAMless SSD in the world, however, that can reach the speeds of 11GB/s read and 9.3GB/s write with up to 1500K read 1.6K write at low 4K random disk access. As we have mentioned, the Micron 3610 is not available to consumer sales and is a client SSD restricted to oems only, which means you will no doubt be seeing this in a configured Gen5 ultrabook soon enough.
The Micron 3610 contains the Phison PS5031-E31 4-channel Gen 5 DRAMless NVMe SSD controller and a single piece of 2TB Micron 276-layer G9 NAND which can operate as fast as 3.6GB/s IO speed. This is a DRAMless SSD that relies on your systems memory, or host memory buffer (HMB), to speed up your SSD as one with a DRAM chip might normally accomplish.
This is a 2-chip low power SSD that speaks to power efficiency and claims 43% better performance per watt and 19% higher density than the previous gen and can only be described as a very cool running SSD ideal for ultrabooks.
The Micron 3610 is a single sided M.2 SSD that has effective thermal power management and AI-optimized speeds as it can load 20B parameter large language model (LLM) in under three seconds. It will include a 3-year limited warranty with 400TBW (1TB), 800TBW (2TB) and 1200TBW (4TB) endurance.
Let’s check out some speeds…