KIOXIA Europe GmbH today introduced its 2nd generation SSDs designed with PCIe 5.0 interface technology[1]. The company's new KIOXIA CD8 Series data center NVMe SSDs are optimized for hyperscale data center and enterprise server-attached workloads, and utilize PCIe 5.0 interface technology, which doubles the bandwidth over PCIe 4.0 from 16 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) to 32GT/s. The CD8 Series is now available for customer evaluation.

Based on KIOXIA's 5th generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology, the CD8 Series utilizes a proprietary KIOXIA controller and firmware, which can be customized to customer needs, and is housed in a 2.5-inch[2], 15mm Z-height form factor.

The new drives are designed to the PCIe 5.0, Open Compute Project (OCP) Datacenter NVMe SSD 2.0 and NVMe 1.4 specifications, and are well-suited to applications and use cases that include high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, caching layer, financial trading and analysis.

"PCIe 5.0 is expected to become the dominant interface in the next two to three years," said Paul Rowan, Vice President SSD Marketing and Engineering, KIOXIA Europe GmbH. "With the introduction of the CD8 Series , KIOXIA is in the ideal situation to support those customers who wish to transition earlier to PCIe 5.0."

Additional features include:

Read-intensive 1DWPD endurance models targeted for hyperscale and server-centric workloads, in capacities from 960GB to 15.36TB
Mixed-use 3DWPD endurance targeted models are available, in capacities from 800GB to 12.8TB
Delivers up to 1.25M random read IOPS and 7.2GB/s sequential read throughput, an improvement of approximately 14% over the previous generation version[3]
Security options include sanitize instant erase (SIE) and self-encrypted drive (SED)[4]

Notes:

[1] KIOXIA CD7 E3.S Series, as of November 9, 2021. KIOXIA survey.
[2] “2.5-inch" indicates the form factor of the SSD. It does not indicate the drive's physical size.
[3] 1DWPD model comparison with the previous generation KIOXIA CD7 Series.
[4] Availability of security/encryption options may vary by region.