The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic led to severe delays in manufacturing and logistics. In particular, governments worldwide began implementing border restrictions in 2Q20 to combat the ongoing health crisis, leading to a sudden decline in order volumes for channel-market SSDs, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Annual shipment of SSDs to the channel (retail) market reached 111.5 million units in 2020, a 15% YoY decrease. In terms of market share by shipment, Kingston, ADATA, and Kimtigo once again occupied the top three spots, respectively.

Looking at the channel market for SSDs as a whole, NAND Flash suppliers (among which Samsung possessed the largest market share) accounted for around 35% of the total shipments in 2020, while SSD module makers accounted for the other 65%. The top 10 module makers accounted for 71% of channel-market SSD shipments from all SSD module makers. Taken together, these figures show that the market remained relatively oligopolistic in 2020. However, it should be noted that TrendForce's ranking of SSD module makers for 2020 takes account of only products bound for the channel market and under brands owned by the module makers themselves; NAND Flash suppliers were therefore excluded from the top 10 ranking.

GIGABYTE Technology, an industry leader in high-performance servers and workstations, today announced a new server, GIGABYTE R282-Z9G, that gets around hardware and software RAID limitations that bottleneck RAID when used with NVMe SSDs. Continuing in the success of the R282 series, the new SKU was designed to house an all-in-one server solution that specifically targets high performance NVMe (Gen4) SSDs for RAID by incorporating the GRAID SupremeRAID solution into the R282-Z9G. This is the first GIGABYTE server to incorporate a GRAID Technology solution and has proven to be highly successful with Kioxia CM6-R SSDs.

More and more companies are using flash storage and doing so on a larger scale; however, there may be pitfalls when using RAID, such as limitations in computing performance or consuming a large amount of CPU resources. To solve these problems and to do so with a large amount of drives, the GRAID SupremeRAID works by installing a virtual NVMe controller on the OS while integrating a PCIe device for high performance. With this GIGABYTE solution over 100 GB/s of throughput is possible for workloads in HPC, 4K/8K video editing, high-frequency trading, online transaction processing, or database processing.

Presenting at the China Flash-Market Summit, KIOXIA unveiled its plans to leverage PCI-Express 5.0 to double SSD performance over the current generation. In typical 4-lane U.2 and M.2 connections, PCI-Express Gen 5 enables an interface bandwidth of 16 GB/s per direction (comparable to PCI-Express 3.0 x16). This means that accounting for interface overheads, typical PCIe Gen 5 SSDs will dance around the 11-15 GB/s (sequential) range. KIOXIA unveiled the CD7, a prototype enterprise SSD in the 2.5-inch EDSFF E3S form-factor with U.2 PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface. This drive, the company claims, offers up to 14 GB/s sequential transfers, more than double the performance of the current CM6 series drives that leverage PCI-Express Gen 4.

KIOXIA said that its first PCI-Express Gen 5 SSDs will begin shipping in Q4-2021, although it didn't mention if this was mass-market, or to select customers. The first enterprise platforms to leverage Gen 5 won't arrive before mid-2022, with Intel's Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" processors that feature PCI-Express Gen 5 support. KIOXIA sounded optimistic about the future growth in performance of SSDs. "Today, Moore's Law is technically dead in both the CPU and DRAM, but it still works at the PCIe clock rate," the company said, adding ""2015 [was] be the third generation of PCIe, 2019 is the fourth generation, and 2022 will be the fifth generation. Even if people spend a lot of money, they can't double CPU nodes to improve system performance, but buying Gen 5 SSD instead of Gen 4 SSD can greatly improve system performance."

Low latency, high endurance Storage Class Memory (SCM) is coming to KIOXIA SSDs. KIOXIA America, Inc. is now sampling its FL6 Series enterprise NVMe SCM SSDs. Featuring the KIOXIA SCM solution, XL-FLASH, the dual-port and PCIe 4.0-compliant KIOXIA FL6 Series SSDs bridge the gap between DRAM and TLC-based drives, making them well-suited to latency-sensitive use cases such as caching layer, tiering and write logging.

Based on KIOXIA's innovative BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology with 1-bit-per-cell SLC, XL-FLASH SCM brings low latency and high performance to data center and enterprise storage. While volatile memory solutions such as DRAM provide the access speed needed by demanding applications, it comes at a high cost. SCM addresses this by providing high density, lower cost non-volatile flash memory.

NAND Flash suppliers' Clients in the data center segment were gradually stepping up enterprise SSD procurement after finishing inventory adjustments, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. Moreover, the adoption rate of 4/8 TB products in the enterprise SSD market increased substantially on account of the releases and adoption of the new server processor platforms from Intel and AMD. Although the recent wave of COVID-19 outbreaks that struck Southeast Asia weakened smartphone sales in 2Q21, the quarterly total NAND Flash bit shipments rose by nearly 9% QoQ, as PC OEMs still had plenty of component orders in 2Q21 due to the fairly robust notebook demand during the period. On the other hand, the shortage of controller ICs became more severe during the period, and the winter storm that battered Texas this February affected the operation of Samsung's foundry fab Line S2 in Austin. As demand for NAND Flash products rose, the overall ASP also rose by nearly 7% QoQ, and the quarterly total NAND Flash revenue rose by 10.8% QoQ to US$16.4 billion in 2Q21.

Kioxia Corporation, a world leader in memory solutions, today announced two new solid state drive (SSD) series scheduled to be released in the fourth quarter of 2021. The EXCERIA PRO and EXCERIA G2 Series are the company's latest consumer-grade solutions for today's hardcore enthusiasts and mainstream DIY system builders. Kioxia's new SSDs, which are products under development, will be on reference exhibit at the China Digital Entertainment Expo and Conference (ChinaJoy) in Shanghai from July 30th to August 2nd.

Using the next generation PCIe Gen4 x4 interface, the EXCERIA PRO Series is built for demanding PC environments. This brand new series will offer more than 2x the max sequential read speeds of the PCIe Gen3 based EXCERIA PLUS Series, delivering a high performance storage experience for content creators, gamers and professionals.

Western Digital has apparently delayed the introduction of Penta Layer Cell (PLC) NAND-based flash to 2025. The company had already disclosed development on the technology back in 2019, around the same time that Toshiba announced it (Toshiba which is now Kioxia, and a Western Digital partner in the development of the technology). The information was disclosed at Bank of America Merrill Lynch 2021 Global Technology Conference, where Western Digital's technology and strategy chief Siva Sivaram said that "I expect that transition [from QLC to PLC] will be slower. So maybe in the second half of this decade we are going to see some segments starting to get 5 bits per cell."

PLC is another density-increase step for NAND flash, whereby each NAND cell can have five bits written into it, thus increasing the amount of information available in the same NAND footprint. To achieve these 5 bits, each cell must store one of 32 voltage states, which in turn inform the flash controller of which corresponding data bits are stored herein. Siva Sivaram said that he expect the technology to take some more time to mature than most, due to the need for controller development that can take advantage of the increased density while making up for the shortcoming in this increased bit-per-cell approach (lower endurance and lower performance). PLC won't bring us HDD-tier storage density by itself (it only enables storage of 25% more data per cell); however, when paired with increasing layers of NAND flash, those 25% extra quickly add up.

Enterprise SSD procurement has been rising on the back of growing server shipments since 2Q21, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In particular, the share of 8 TB products in shipments of SSDs to data centers has shown the most noticeable growth, which is expected to persist through 3Q21. However, certain SSD components and parts may be in shortage due to insufficient foundry capacity. TrendForce is therefore revising the QoQ hikes in contract prices of enterprise SSDs for 3Q21 to 10-15% from the previous projection of 5-10%.

TrendForce further indicates that the high demand for enterprise SSDs in 3Q21 is attributed to several factors. First, North American cloud service providers (hyperscalers) have pretty much completed their inventory adjustments and now continue to expand their storage capacity. Second, the flow of incoming orders to traditional server brands is getting stronger over the quarters as government agencies and SMBs increase their budgets for IT infrastructure. Third, Intel and AMD are ramping up production for server CPUs based on their respective new processor platforms. Following the adoption of new CPUs, the overall demand for enterprise SSDs has also shifted to higher-density products because clients want to upgrade their computing power and storage capacity. Specifically, demand is mainly trending toward 4/8 TB SSDs since raising NAND Flash density can lower the cost of SSD deployment.

Total NAND Flash revenue for 1Q21 increased by 5.1% QoQ to US$14.82 billion, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. In particular, bit shipments rose by 11% QoQ, while the overall ASP dropped by 5% QoQ; hence, bit shipment growth offset the decline in the overall ASP. Although NAND Flash demand from notebook computer and smartphone manufacturers remained high, clients from the data center segment exhibited relatively weak demand, since this segment had yet to leave the state of NAND Flash oversupply. Contract prices for this quarter therefore still mostly showed a considerable QoQ drop. On the other hand, OEMs/ODMs of end products began to increase procurement of NAND Flash products from the second half of January onward because they noticed that the shortage of NAND Flash controller ICs was affecting the production of medium- and low-density storage products. Besides avoiding a possible supply crunch in the future, OEMs/ODMs were placing additional orders because they were preparing for a push to expand market share. On account of these developments, the overall NAND Flash demand surpassed expectations in 1Q21.

Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, today announced a 20 billion yen investment to expand its Technology Development Building at its Yokohama Technology Campus and to establish its new Shin-Koyasu Advanced Research Center. The new facilities are expected to be operational by 2023 and will strengthen Kioxia's research and technology development by bringing together its R&D sites in Kanagawa Prefecture to improve efficiency and to create a more conducive working environment for innovation through collaboration.

At the Yokohama Technology Campus, the expanded Technology Development Building will nearly double the space of the current facility, allowing Kioxia to expand its product evaluation capabilities that will, in turn, increase its product quality. The expanded facility will also provide space for an increased workforce to strengthen product development in the future. The new building will also feature an environmentally friendly design with highly efficient energy-saving equipment.

KIOXIA today announced that its lineup of CM6 Series PCIe 4.0 enterprise NVMe SSDs has been successfully tested and certified to support NVIDIA's Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage. Modern AI and data science applications are synonymous with massive datasets - as are the storage requirements that go along with them. Part of the NVIDIA Magnum IO subsystem designed for GPU-accelerated compute environments, NVIDIA Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage allows the GPU to bypass the CPU and communicate directly with NVMe SSD storage. This improves overall system performance while reducing the impact on host CPU and memory resources. Through rigorous testing conducted by NVIDIA, KIOXIA's CM6 drives have been confirmed to meet the demanding storage requirements of GPU-intensive applications.

Large AI/ML, HPC modeling and data analytics datasets need to be moved and processed in real-time, pushing performance requirements through the roof," said Neville Ichhaporia, vice president, SSD marketing and product management for KIOXIA America, Inc. "By delivering speeds up to 16.0 gigatransfers per second throughput per lane, our CM6 Series SSDs enable NVIDIA's Magnum IO GPUDirect Storage to work with increasingly large and distributed datasets, thereby improving overall application performance and providing a path to scaling dataset sizes even further."

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced sampling of its 1 terabyte (TB) Universal Flash Storage (UFS) Ver. 3.1 embedded flash memory devices. Housed in a 1.1 mm-high package - making it the thinnest 1 TB UFS offering available - the new product utilizes KIOXIA's BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and achieves sequential read speed of up to 2,050 MB/sec and sequential write speed of up to 1,200 MB/sec.

Mobile devices are constantly evolving, and 5G networks are poised to deliver levels of speed, scale and complexities the likes of which have never been seen before. Reaping the connectivity benefits of 5G - namely, faster downloads and reduced lag time - requires high performance and low power consumption. Additionally, with 5G making it easier and faster for users to store even more on their mobile devices, the storage requirements for smartphones and other applications are increasing at a rapid pace. KIOXIA's 1 TB UFS brings the ultra-high speed read/write performance, low power consumption, shortened application launch times and storage capacity demanded by 5G and other digital consumer products.

The transition to PCIe 4.0 is in full swing, and Kioxia Corporation, a world leader in memory solutions, is leading the way forward. Today, the company announced that its lineup of KIOXIA CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVM Express (NVMe ) enterprise and data center solid state drives (SSDs) have gained compatibility approval with Super Micro Computer, Inc. (Supermicro)'s PCIe 4.0-based platforms, including a wide range of enterprise-ready rackmount systems encompassing Ultra, WIO, BigTwin, FatTwin, SuperBlade, 1U/2U NVMe all flash arrays, GPU accelerated systems and SuperWorkstations.

Users are moving to NVMe SSDs to address the demands of enterprise performance requirements, cloud-based data center architectures, and performance-centric and latency-sensitive applications. At the center of this movement is heightened demand for NVMe -based storage where PCIe 4.0 is the latest performance upgrade, and Kioxia's CM6 and CD6 Series SSDs are delivering these enhanced capabilities.

Kioxia Corporation and Western Digital Corp., today announced that the companies have developed their sixth-generation, 162-layer 3D flash memory technology. Marking the next milestone in the companies' 20-year joint-venture partnership, this is the companies' highest density and most advanced 3D flash memory technology to date, utilizing a wide range of technology and manufacturing innovations.

"Through our strong partnership that has spanned two decades, Kioxia and Western Digital have successfully created unrivaled capabilities in manufacturing and R&D," said Masaki Momodomi, Chief Technology Officer, Kioxia. "Together, we produce over 30 percent of the world's flash memory bits and are steadfast in our mission to provide exceptional capacity, performance and reliability at a compelling cost. We each deliver this value proposition across a range of data-centric applications from personal electronics to data centers as well as emerging applications enabled by 5G networks, artificial intelligence and autonomous systems."

The percentage distribution of 2021 NAND Flash bit demand by application currently shows that client SSD accounts for 31%, enterprise SSD 20%, eMMC/UFS 41%, and NAND wafer 8%, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. TrendForce expects NAND Flash ASP to undergo QoQ declines throughout 2021, since the number of NAND suppliers far exceeds DRAM suppliers, and the bit supply remains high. As Samsung, YMTC, SK Hynix, and Intel actively expand their NAND Flash bit output in 1Q21, the oversupply situation in the industry will become more severe, with a forecasted 6% QoQ increase in NAND Flash bit output and a 10-15% QoQ decline in NAND Flash ASP in 1Q21.

Total NAND Flash revenue reached US$14.5 billion in 3Q20, a 0.3% increase QoQ, while total NAND Flash bit shipment rose by 9% QoQ, but the ASP fell by 9% QoQ, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. The market situation in 3Q20 can be attributed to the rising demand from the consumer electronics end as well as the recovering smartphone demand before the year-end peak sales season. Notably, in the PC market, the rise of distance education contributed to the growing number and scale of Chromebook tenders, but the increase in the demand for Chromebook devices has not led to a significant increase in NAND Flash consumption because storage capacity is rather limited for this kind of notebook computer. Moreover, clients in the server and data center segments had aggressively stocked up on components and server barebones during 2Q20 due to worries about the impact of the pandemic on the supply chain. Hence, their inventories reached a fairly high level by 3Q20. Clients are now under pressure to control and reduce their inventories during this second half of the year. With them scaling back procurement, the overall NAND Flash demand has also weakened, leading to a downward turn in the contract prices of most NAND Flash products.

KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) announced another significant technological contribution to cloud data center infrastructures. Today, the company expanded its broad portfolio of client, enterprise and data center SSDs with the addition of the XD6 Series. KIOXIA's E1.S form factor XD6 SSDs are the first Enterprise and Datacenter SSD Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S SSDs to address the specific requirements of hyperscale applications, including the performance, power and thermal requirements of the Open Compute Platform (OCP) NVMe Cloud SSD Specification.

Designed to maximize system density, efficiency and simplicity, KIOXIA's EDSFF E1.x SSDs represent the future of flash storage for servers in cloud and hyperscale data centers. As defined by the EDSFF consortium and leveraging the OCP NVMe Cloud SSD Specification, the flexible, efficient, small form factor E1.S replaces the M.2 form factor and delivers greater density, performance, reliability, and thermal management. E1.S is also designed to be hot pluggable for increased serviceability, which is another benefit over M.2.

Kioxia Corporation, the world leader in memory solutions, today announced it will begin construction of a state-of-the-art fabrication facility (Fab7) at Yokkaichi Plant in Mie Prefecture, Japan to expand production of its proprietary 3D Flash memory BiCS FLASH. The construction of Kioxia Corporation's Fab7 facility is expected to commence in the spring of 2021.

Due to technological innovation, the amount of data being generated, stored and used around the world has increased exponentially. Furthermore, the flash memory market expects further growth driven by cloud services, 5G, IoT, AI and automated driving. As a result, the production of cutting-edge products in Kioxia Corporation's Fab7 facility will continue to meet the increasing demand for memory around the world.

The Fab7 facility will be built on the north side of Yokkaichi Plant, where land development is underway. In order to secure optimal production of advanced flash memory products, the construction of Fab7 will be divided into two phases, with the first phase of construction scheduled to be completed by the spring of 2022. Kioxia plans to fund the capital investments for the construction of Fab7 from its operating cash flow.

Plextor late last week unveiled the M8V Plus line of mainstream SATA SSDs in the 2.5-inch and M.2-2280 form-factors. The M8V Plus is an incremental update of the original M8V series from 2018. What's new is the implementation of KIOXIA-sourced 96-layer TLC NAND flash replacing 64-layer chips from Toshiba. The M8V Plus series comes in 256 GB, 512 GB, and 1 TB variants, while the original M8V came in 128-thru-512 GB variants.

The Silicon Motion SM2258 controller under the hood of the M8V Plus, has been updated to its latest revision, and supports Plextor-innovated Plex Compress technology. This feature uses the controller's idle time to compress files that haven't been accessed for over 30 days. The Plex Turbo feature, which is essentially variable-size SLC cache, has also been improved to be larger in size. On-paper performance hasn't changed, with the company claiming up to 560 MB/s sequential reads, up to 520 MB/s sequential writes, up to 90,000 IOPS 4K random access for the 256 GB and 512 GB variants; and up to 88,000 IOPS random access for the 1 TB variant. The company rates write endurance for the 256 GB variant at 140 TBW, 512 GB variant at 280 TBW, and 560 TBW for the 1 TB variant. All three variants are backed by 3-year warranties. The company didn't reveal pricing.

KIOXIA is readying its next-generation flagship client-segment SSD, the XG7. Some details of the drive surfaced on the UNH NVMe Integrator's List and dug out by Komachi Ensaka. We know the drive's form-factor from the fact that the company's XG6 is a client-segment drive in the M.2-2280 form-factor, which leverages PCIe Gen 3. The XG7 is described as utilizing PCIe Gen 4 and the NVMe 1.4 protocol. No other details were revealed. The drive could utilize the company's latest generation BiCS Flash memory. There's no word on date of announcement of the drive by the company.

Direct-attached performance from network-attached devices is no longer a thing of storage architects' dreams. KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.), is now sampling Ethernet SSDs to select partners and customers interested in validating the benefits of Ethernet attached storage to their existing Ethernet (RoCEv2) networks. KIOXIA has been working in collaboration with key industry players Marvell, Foxconn-Ingrasys and Accton to bring groundbreaking Ethernet Bunch of Flash (EBOF) technology solutions to market - and this announcement is pivotal to that endeavor.

In an ongoing quest to contain explosive amounts of data, storage capacity and bandwidth must continue to grow while processing time must decrease. An EBOF system addresses these challenges through an Ethernet fabric that can scale flash and optimally disaggregate storage from compute. The EBOF storage solution bypasses the cost, complexity, and system limitations inherent with standard JBOF storage systems, which typically include a CPU, DRAM, HBA, and switch. This accelerates applications and workloads where disaggregated low-latency, high bandwidth, highly available storage is needed - bringing greatly improved performance and lower total cost of ownership to edge, enterprise and cloud data centers.

The NAND Flash industry benefitted from strong demand for PCs and servers in 2Q20 as the COVID-19 pandemic caused a demand surge for cloud services and technologies that are related to working from home, according to TrendForce's latest investigations. This, in turn, kept demand high for SSDs. However, the smartphone and consumer electronics markets had not recovered from the impact of the pandemic. The demand for these products therefore declined compared to the previous quarter. In 2Q20, total NAND Flash bit shipment and ASP both experienced a minor increase of about 3% QoQ, while NAND Flash revenue reached US$14.5 billion, a 6.5% increase QoQ.

Kioxia, previously Toshiba Memory Holdings has recently announced plans for an initial public offering on the Tokyo stock exchange in October with a projected market capitalization of 19 billion USD. Kioxia is the world's second-largest manufacturer of NAND flash memory behind Samsung Electronics, the company has experienced heavy losses in recent years recording a loss of 1.6 billion USD in the previous financial year. The company is currently owned by Toshiba with a 40% stake with the rest being held by a consortium of US, Japanese, and South Korean investors. The funds raised will be directed towards growth investments and investor rewards.

KIOXIA America Inc, is the first supplier to launch PCIe Gen4 NVM Express (NVMe ) data center-class solid-state drives (SSDs) within the HPE NVMe mainstream performance SSD portfolio available on HPE ProLiant, HPE Synergy and HPE Apollo servers. KIOXIA offers the industry's broadest SSD product portfolio and has been collaborating with HPE to create best-in-class flash-based storage solutions for years. Today, the company announced that its CD6 Series of PCIe Gen4 NVMe U.3 SSDs now enables HPE customers to upgrade from SATA to NVMe performance at an affordable price point.

Wafer-scale design is getting popular it seems. Starting from the wafer-scale engine presented by Cerebras last year, which caused quite the shakeup in the industry, it seems that this design approach might be more useful than anyone thought. During VLSI Symposium 2020, Shigeo Oshima, Chief Engineer at Kioxia, had a presentation about new developments in SSD designs and implementations. What was one of the highlights of the presentation was the information that Kioxia is working on, was a technology Kioxia is referring to as wafer-level SSD.

The NAND chips used in SSDs would no longer be cut from the wafer and packaged separately. Instead, the wafer itself would represent the SSD. This is a similar approach Cerebras used with its wafer-scale engine AI processor. What would be gains of this approach compared to traditional methods of cutting up NAND chips and packaging them separately you might wonder? Well, for starters you wouldn't need to cut the wafer, package individual memory chips, and build the SSD out of them. Those steps could be skipped and there would be some cost savings present. And imagine if you decide to do wafer stacking. You could build super scaling SSDs with immense performance capable of millions of IOPS. However, for now, this is only a concept and it is just in early development. There is no possibility to find it in a final product anytime soon.