A new era for flash used in servers and storage is here, and it's being introduced by KIOXIA America, Inc. Today, the company announced the industry's first lineup of Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S SSDs designed with PCIe 5.0 technology - the CD7 Series. Building on the KIOXIA E3.S full-function development vehicle that received a 'Best in Show' award at last year's Flash Memory Summit, the CD7 Series E3.S increases flash storage density per drive for optimized power efficiency and rack consolidation.

Breaking free from the design limitations of the 2.5-inch form factor, the EDSFF E3 family is optimized for the needs of high-performance, highly efficient servers and storage. EDSFF enables the next generation of SSDs to address future data center architectures, while supporting a variety of new devices and applications. It provides improved airflow and thermals, signal integrity benefits, and options for larger SSD capacity points. EDSFF standardizes status LEDs on the drive, which eliminates the need for LEDs on the drive carriers. Support for higher E3.S power budgets than 2.5-inch form factor SSDs and better signal integrity allows EDSFF to deliver the performance promised by PCIe 5.0 technology and beyond.Based on KIOXIA's innovative fourth generation BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory technology, the CD7 Series supports x4 PCIe lanes, but is optimized for PCIe Gen5x2 performance, which is similar to PCIe Gen4x4 performance, saving two valuable PCIe lanes for additional device connections. KIOXIA is an active and contributing member to the industry development of EDSFF solutions, and is collaborating with leading server and storage system developers to unlock the full power of flash memory, NVMe and PCIe technologies.

"The EDSFF E3 form factor is set to redefine the way enterprise servers and storage are designed," noted Greg Wong, founder and principal analyst, Forward Insights. "We expect the market to transition to EDSFF starting in 2022, with the introduction of PCIe 5.0 based systems."

CD7 Series Key Features

• EDSFF E3.S form factor with capacities up to 7.68TB
• Designed to latest PCIe 5.0 specification and optimized for x2 PCIe lane performance
• Using fewer PCIe lanes increases number of PCIe devices that can be supported
• Built on KIOXIA BiCS FLASH 3D TLC flash memory
• Up to 6,450 MB/s read throughput and 1,050K random read IOPS
• 75μs read and 14μs write latencies, which are 17% and 60% lower latencies than previous generation PCIe 4.0 SSDs, respectively.

"We see EDSFF as the enterprise NVMe SSD form factor of the future," said Neville Ichhaporia, vice president, SSD marketing and product management, KIOXIA America, Inc. "The E3 versions, optimized for the next generation of enterprise platforms, are well suited to keep technological pace with the incremental demands data-intensive applications are placing on servers and storage. This will help customers optimize performance, cooling and storage capacity in next generation servers and storage."