Micron announces a QLC SSD just weeks after killing its beloved Crucial brand — the 3610 is a basic Gen5 SSD that's somehow faster than Gen4 TLC
Micron 3610 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD offers high-speed QLC storage, low latency, AI readiness, compact form, and strong endurance.
(Image credit: Micron)
- Micron 3610 NVMe SSD offers the world’s only 4TB capacity in a single-sided M.2 2230
- Random read and write performance scales proportionally with the drive’s capacity
- Endurance increases with size
At CES 2026, Micron unveiled the 3610 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD, a QLC-based drive for mainstream OEM PCs and notebooks.
This launch occurred weeks after Micron's December 2025 announcement that it would be discontinuing its Crucial consumer-SSD brand to focus on the enterprise and AI markets.
Micron says, the launch is the world’s first Gen5 G9 QLC client SSD, supporting PCIe Gen5 and NVMe 2.0 in multiple M.2 form factors.
Read and write speed upgrade
This device features a compact single-sided 2230 form factor that supports 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB storage capacity, allowing it to accommodate a range of ultra-thin laptops.
Micron claims sequential read speeds improve up to 57%, and sequential writes increase by 45% compared with Gen4 QLC drives.
The Micron 3610 NVMe SSD reportedly reaches sequential read speeds of up to 11,000 MB/s, but the write speeds vary depending on the storage capacity.
While the 1TB model hit write speeds of 7,200 MB/s, the 2TB and 4TB variants record around 9,300 MB/s.
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The device’s random read and write performance increases with capacity, reaching 850 KIOPS read and 1,500 KIOPS write at 1TB, and up to 1,500 KIOPS read and 1,600 KIOPS write on larger capacities.
Its typical read latency is 50ms, while write latency remains at 12ms, which contributes to responsive multitasking, smooth media workflows, and faster application launches.
This level of performance, combined with AI-ready speed, reportedly enables multi-billion-parameter AI models to load in under three seconds.
The 3610’s endurance scales with capacity, with the 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models rated at 400 TBW, 800 TBW, and 1,600 TBW, respectively, while all drives share a mean time to failure of two million hours.
The drive incorporates Micron G9 QLC NAND and supports hardware AES 256-bit encryption.