Kioxia has presented the first SSDs connected to the PCIe 5.0 interface of the industry. In addition to the performance improvements of the protocol itself, the company debuts a new form factor that frees itself from the limitations of the classic 2.5-inch models.
Flash-based storage, and specifically solid-state drives, absolutely dominate storage solutions for PCs, both those installed in new OEM equipment and in the retail market. Hard drives still dominate the enterprise market, but the pace of robust storage adoption is accelerating.
Kioxia Corporation has unveiled its new CD7 series solutions for data centers and they present some exciting news. On the one hand, they connect to the PCIe 5.0 interface whose support has just been released by Intel on the Alder Lake platform. It is undoubtedly the bus of the future, and we will see great news in 2022.
The new SSD will make use of the possibilities of the port, especially in performance when using a frequency of 32 GHz until reaching a bandwidth of 128 GB / s in full duplex, doubling that of the current PCI Express 4.0 and at the same time quadrupling that of PCI Express 3.0.
The Kioxia CD7 uses own memories BiCS FLASH 3D TLC and achieve sequential read performance of up to 6,450MB / s and 1050K in random read IOPS. In the medium term, these types of units will achieve a throughput of up to 14 GB / s. Latencies are 60% lower than drives connected to PCIe 4.0 and operate on only two lanes with two more lanes reserved for additional device connections.
Another novelty of these units is the use of the format EDSFF E3.S. A new form factor optimized for high-performance, high-efficiency server and storage needs, addressing future data center architectures while supporting a variety of new devices and applications.
Compared to the standard 2.5-inch form factor, it provides improved airflow and thermals, signal integrity benefits, and options for larger storage capacities. Kioxia units will offer capacities up to 7.68 Tbytes and the storage industry is expected to transition to EDSFF starting in 2022 with the introduction of PCIe 5.0-based systems.
