KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced the availability of its new KIOXIA XD8 Series PCIe 5.0 Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E1.S SSDs. The new drives are the third generation of E1.S SSDs from KIOXIA and are compliant with PCIe 5.0 (32 GT/s x 4) and NVMe 2.0 specifications, and support the Open Compute Project (OCP) Datacenter NVMe SSD v2.5 specification.

Designed for cloud and hyperscale environments, the KIOXIA XD8 Series meets the growing demand for higher performance, enhanced efficiency, and greater scalability in data centers. The new drives empower cloud providers and hyperscalers to optimize their infrastructure, delivering superior performance while maintaining operational efficiency."Microsoft Azure's leading-edge data centers deliver high levels of performance, quality of service and reliability to our customers," said Pablo Ziperovich, GM, Azure Memory & Storage Center of Excellence (AMS CoE), Microsoft Corporation. "We leverage new technologies and standards for SSDs, like PCIe 5.0 and the E1.S form factor, and support the OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD V2.5 specification. The latest SSDs, like KIOXIA's XD8 Series drives, provide high density, lower power, high performance and serviceability that are required by Microsoft data centers."

KIOXIA XD8 Series highlights include:

• Additional NVMe support includes NVM Express Management Interface (NVMe-MI) v1.2c
• Sequential read performance up to 12,500 gigabytes per second (a 73% improvement over the previous generation)
• Sequential write performance up to 5,800 megabytes per second (a 20% improvement)
• Random Read performance of 2,300 K Input Output Per Second (IOPS) (a 48% improvement)
• Random write performance up to 250 K IOPS (a 25% improvement)
• EDSFF E1.S form factor with 9.5 mm, 15 mm and 25 mm heat sink options
• KIOXIA designed SSD controller, BiCS FLASH 3D flash memory and firmware
• Non-SED and TCG Opal SSC SED options
• Full end-to-end data protection, power loss protection

"The KIOXIA XD8 Series is engineered to deliver superior PCIe 5.0 performance over previous generation SSDs and optimize thermal management, addressing the needs of OCP hyperscale environments," noted Neville Ichhaporia, senior vice president and general manager of the SSD business unit at KIOXIA America, Inc. "As an active member of the OCP community, KIOXIA is committed to collaborating with leading server and storage system developers to harness the full potential of flash memory, NVMe, and PCIe technologies. Our continued innovation in this space ensures that the industry remains prepared to meet both current demands and future requirements."

Available in capacities of 1.92, 3.84 and 7.68 terabytes (TB), KIOXIA XD8 Series evaluation drives are now sampling to select customers.