Kioxia lanches the industry’s First EDSFF SSD

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Kioxia announced that it will launch a new generation of SSDs based on the PCIe 5.0 specification for enterprise customers in data centers, namely the CD7 E3.S Series EDSFF E3.S. At the 2021 Flash Memory Summit (CFMS) held more than a month ago, Kioxia already showed the prototype of the relevant SSD.

Kioxia has got rid of the limitations of the previous shape design on this SSD, optimized for high-performance, efficient server and storage requirements, to cope with the future data center architecture, and support a variety of new devices and applications. The EDSFF form factor has higher power and better signal integrity, allowing PCIe 5.0 SSDs to achieve higher performance indicators. With the release of SSD based on PCIe 5.0 specification, enterprise SSD will gradually transition to EDSFF form factor in the future.

CD7 E3.S Series EDSFF E3.S

CD7 E3.S Series EDSFF E3.S SSD adopts KIOXIA’s fourth-generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology, supports four PCIe lanes, and is optimized for PCIe 5.0 x2, which helps reduce the number of PCIe lanes used to increase the number of PCIe devices. The maximum capacity of this product is 7.68TB, using BiCS FLASH 3D TLC flash memory, the sequential read speed is 6450 MB/s, and the random read performance is 1050K IOPS. In addition, the read latency is 75μs and the write latency is 14μs, which is 17% and 60% lower than the previous generation PCIe 4.0 SSD.

Kioxia once demonstrated a PCIe 5.0 SSD with a read speed of 14 GB/s and a write speed of 7 GB/s, according to previous statements, in the future, an 8-channel controller version will be provided for data center applications, and a 16-channel controller version will also be provided for enterprise-level applications. Both EDSFF and 2.5-inch U.2 versions will be available in the second quarter of next year, with capacities ranging from 1.6TB to 30TB. This means that starting next year, enterprise-level SSDs will gradually shift to PCIe 5.0 SSDs, and there may be more powerful products.

In contrast, consumer SSDs are still in the transition from PCIe 3.0 to PCIe 4.0, and PCIe 5.0 SSDs will be popularized later. Industry insiders predict that the transition of consumer-grade SSDs to PCIe 5.0 will need to wait until 2024.

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