KIOXIA America, Inc, announced that it is sampling its 2nd generation PCIe 5.0 SSD for enterprise and data center customers. After being the first vendor to offer a drive using the PCIe 5.0 interface, KIOXIA has now introduced the new CD8 Series data center NVMe SSD family. CD8 SSDs double the bandwidth per lane over PCIe 4.0 SSDs from 16 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) to 32GT/s and are optimized for hyperscale data center and enterprise server-attached workloads.

"Today, PCIe 4.0 SSDs are considered at the forefront in terms of delivering the highest levels of drive performance," commented Greg Wong, founder and principal analyst, Forward Insights. "Next generation PCIe 5.0 SSDs provide twice the level of performance, and will continue to propel the PCIe/NVMe SSD market - which is expected to grow at a CAGR of over 20% out to 2026."

Based on the KIOXIA 5th generation BiCS FLASH TLC 3D flash memory technology, the CD8 Series' 7th generation enterprise SSD design utilizes a proprietary KIOXIA controller and firmware in a 2.5-inch, 15mm Z-height form factor. The new drives are designed to the PCIe 5.0, Open Compute Project (OCP) Datacenter NVMe SSD and NVMe 1.4 specifications, and are well-suited to applications and use cases that include high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, caching layer, content streaming, and financial trading and analysis.

Key features:

• Read-intensive 1 DWPD endurance targeted for hyperscale and server-centric workloads, in capacities from 960 gigabytes to 15.36 terabytes
• Mixed-use 3 DWPD endurance targeted for enterprise and write-intensive workloads, in capacities from 800 gigabytes to 12.8 terabytes
• Delivers 7.2 GB/s sequential read throughput and random read performance of 1.25 million IOPS
• Delivers 6.0 GB/s sequential write throughput and random write performance of 200 K, an improvement of up to 135% over the previous generation version
• Available in multiple device security options including sanitize instant erase (SIE) and self-encrypted drive (SED) in a 2.5-inch form factor

"As a leading supplier of SSDs for enterprise server, storage, and data center customers, KIOXIA continues to build on its legacy of rapidly bringing to market next-generation PCIe technologies on the latest 3D flash memory lithography," noted Neville Ichhaporia, vice president of SSD marketing and product management, KIOXIA America, Inc. "The CD8 Series offers improved write performance and consistent Quality-of-Service across a wide range of workloads, enabling enterprise and hyperscale data center customers to realize their application needs."