Silicon Motion has officially unveiled its cutting-edge PCIe Gen6 SSD controller, the SM8466, designed to power next-generation enterprise-level storage solutions. This release comes after months of speculation and hints from the company that they were working on Gen6 controllers, and now it’s here, marking a huge leap forward for high-performance storage. Initially, PCIe Gen6 controllers will be rolled out for the enterprise and data center sectors, with consumer models likely not arriving until at least the end of the decade.
Even PCIe Gen5 SSDs are still not fully mainstream, which makes Gen6 a distant dream for consumer markets.
The SM8466 is part of the MonTitan series, which focuses on enterprise-grade storage products. Built on the advanced TSMC 4nm process node, it will support the SCA interface and offer an impressive capacity of up to 512 TB-substantially more than the previous SM8366 model. This makes it a massive step forward in terms of scalability and performance
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Among the standout features, the SM8466 is fully compliant with the latest NVMe 2.0+ interface and the OCP NVME SSD Spec 2.5. It also includes SR-IOV / MPF, SMART monitoring, End-To-End Data protection, Secure Boot, AES-256, TCG Opal, and Attestation support-ensuring a high level of security and reliability for enterprise use.
In terms of performance, the SM8466 will deliver up to 28 GB/s speeds-doubling the 14 GB/s speed of existing Gen5 SSDs-and achieve up to 7 million IOPS. To put this into perspective, here’s a comparison of the SM8466 (Gen6) against the previous-generation SM8366 (Gen5):
- Process Node: 4nm vs 12nm
- Capacity: 512 TB vs 128 TB
- Speed: 28 GB/s vs 14.2 GB/s
- IOPS: 7 million vs 3.5 million
Silicon Motion is only releasing the specifications for the SM8466 at FMS 2025. The actual products won’t arrive until at least 2026 or 2027, as next-gen data centers begin to roll out. Consumers will likely have to wait until 2030 for Gen6 SSDs to hit the market. However, with Micron, SK Hynix, and other manufacturers already working on Gen6 solutions, we can expect them to follow suit with their own updates soon.