KIOXIA CD7 and XD6 SSDs Announced

KIOXIA has announced two new major data center drives; the CD7 E3.S and 9.5mm XD6 E1.S Enterprise and Datacenter SSDs. The CD7 is the industry’s first lineup of EDSFF E3.S SSDs designed with a PCIe Gen5 interface, while the XD6 supports both E1.S 15mm and 25mm form factors so users can choose their ideal balance of cooling via different heatsink options.

KIOXIA has announced two new major data center drives; the CD7 E3.S and 9.5mm XD6 E1.S Enterprise and Datacenter SSDs. The CD7 is the industry’s first lineup of EDSFF E3.S SSDs designed with a PCIe Gen5 interface, while the XD6 supports both E1.S 15mm and 25mm form factors so users can choose their ideal balance of cooling via different heatsink options.

KIOXIA XD6

The KIOXIA EDSFF E1.S XD6 SSDs are purpose-built to optimize system density, efficiency, and management. The E1.S form factor will allow the company to offer the right blend of capacity and performance and is currently on track as potentially the next SSD form factor to replace U.2 in the dense data center. It also offers widespread support and is designed to be hot-pluggable for increased serviceability, which is a huge benefit over M.2 drives (as systems need to be completely shut down in order to remove or install them).

EDSFF E1.S is meant for large-scale deployments in hyperscale data centers due to its ability to scale in areas of capacity, power, performance, and thermals. As these drives are designed to the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD specification, they can be used in the new OCP Yosemite V3 platform. Moreover, EDSFF standardizes status LEDs on the drive, which means LEDs on the drive carriers themselves are not needed.

The read-intensive KIOXIA XD6 also leverages the company’s BiCS FLASH™ 3D flash memory and features 1 DWPD endurance, NVMe 1.3c, and PCIe 4.0 specifications compliancy, and is available in capacities of 1.92TB and 3.84TB. KIOXIA also offers an option for TCG-Opal 2.0 encryption.

KIOXIA CD7

While the new XD6 is designed for hyperscale data centers focusing on performance, power, and thermal requirements, the KIOXIA CD7 is optimized to meet the needs of high-performance, highly efficient servers, and storage. With its E3.S form factor, CD7 provides improved airflow and thermals, signal integrity benefits, and options for larger SSD capacity points.

E3.S has a noticeably higher power budget and improved signal integrity compared to 2.5-inch form factor SSDs. This allows it to offer the performance promised by PCIe Gen5 as well as Gen6 and other technologies that come after.

CD7 also uses KIOXIA’s fourth-generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology and is offered in capacities up to 7.68TB. It is optimized for PCIe Gen5x2, which means it also supports performance similar to PCIe Gen4x4 performance. This saves two valuable PCIe lanes for additional device connections.

KIOXIA quotes performance up to 6,450MB/s read in throughput and 1,050K IOPS read in 4K random. Latencies are expected to reach just 75μs and 14μs for read and write, respectively, which the company indicates is 17% and 60% lower than the previous generation PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

KIOXIA XD6 E1.S

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