Kioxia’s Innovations in Enterprise SSDs
Kioxia, a leading storage solutions provider, has announced a series of groundbreaking products aimed at high-performance enterprise servers and artificial intelligence infrastructures. The new offerings include the company’s first solid-state drives supporting the PCIe 6.0 standard and innovative solutions with integrated liquid cooling.
NX1 Series SSDs with Liquid Cooling
One of the key introductions is the enterprise-class NX1 series SSDs, designed in the E1.S form factor. These drives are engineered for high-performance GPU servers utilized by hyperscalers and large data centers, particularly in AI-driven workloads. The NX1 series marks Kioxia’s first products to offer direct liquid cooling (DLC) support. This advanced cooling option is available for 9.5 mm thick devices, complementing traditional air cooling. Thicker 15 mm variants are exclusively equipped with air cooling.
Kioxia’s First PCIe 6.0 SSDs
Kioxia also unveiled its inaugural solid-state drives compliant with the latest PCIe 6.0 standard. These CM10 series drives incorporate Kioxia’s proprietary 10th-generation 322-layer BiCS FLASH TLC memory chips. Targeting the enterprise segment and AI infrastructures, these new drives promise significant performance enhancements, although specific speed details have not yet been disclosed. The maximum capacity for these solutions can reach up to 61.44 TB.
Advancements in BiCS FLASH Memory
Concurrently with the new SSD announcements, Kioxia has commenced sample shipments of its 9th-generation BiCS FLASH 3D memory. This 230-layer, 1 Terabit (Tbit) Triple-Level Cell (TLC) flash memory demonstrates an impressive data transfer rate of up to 4.8 Gbit/s, underscoring the company’s continuous innovation in storage technology.
I’ve been looking forward to PCIe 6.0 SSDs, especially for my rendering rig. The potential speed boost for large texture sets and scene files is huge. My current PCIe 5.0 setup is good, but I still hit bottlenecks during heavy I/O tasks in Blender. I’m curious about the real-world thermal performance of those liquid-cooled E1.S drives; air cooling on high-capacity NVMe can get noisy and inefficient fast. Hopefully, Kioxia shares some benchmarks soon. A practical tip: always over-provision enterprise SSDs slightly for better sustained performance and longevity, especially with heavy write workloads.