KIOXIA Announces CM7 Line of PCIe Gen5 Enterprise SSDs

[btarunr]

KIOXIA America, Inc. today announced that its CM7 Series enterprise NVMe SSDs are now shipping to select customers. Optimized for the needs of high-performance, highly efficient servers and storage, the CM7 family is designed with PCIe 5.0 technology in Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S and 2.5-inch form factors

Having introduced the industry's first EDSFF drives designed with PCIe 5.0 technology last year, the addition of the CM7 family expands KIOXIA's leadership position and allows OEM customers to deliver best-in-class performance to end users: The CM7 Series nearly saturates the PCIe 5.0 interface at 14 gigabytes/s read throughput.



"PCIe 5.0 will deliver new levels of performance and will usher in a wave of EDSFF form factor SSDs, helping to replace the 2.5-inch form factor for servers and storage," said Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president at IDC. "We expect the EDSFF form factor to grow to over 50% of enterprise SSD unit shipments by 2026. With the new CM7 Series family of SSDs, KIOXIA is well positioned to capitalize on the transition to EDSFF."

The CM7 Series is designed with extensive data integrity protection, a host of security and availability features, and supports the most demanding mission-critical workloads.

CM7 Series highlights include:

• EDSFF E3.S and 2.5-inch 15 mm Z-height form factors designed to the NVMe 2.0 and PCIe 5.0 specifications
• SFF-TA-1001 capable to support Universal Backplane Management enabled systems (also known as U.3)
• Read-intensive (1 DWPD) capacities up to 30.72TB4
• Mixed-use (3 DWPD) capacities up to 12.80 TB
• Dual-port design for high availability applications
• Flash Die Failure Protection maintains full reliability in case of a die failure
• Cutting-edge feature support - SR-IOV, CMB, Multistream writes, SGL
• TCG-Opal SED feature set that is designed to comply with FIPS 140-3

"Applications such as AI, ML, and data analytics continue to drive the need for higher performance from the underlying storage stack, so that users can access, process, and manage data quickly, efficiently, and in real-time," commented Neville Ichhaporia, vice president of SSD marketing and product management, KIOXIA America, Inc. "Our CM7 Series SSDs with PCIe 5.0 technology was designed to meet the demands of next generation use-cases. CM7 not only doubles performance from the prior generation but also offers an expanded set of form factor options, larger capacities, and premium features for our enterprise server and storage customers."

View at TechPowerUp Main Site

 

[Wirko]

It's hard to see why Kioxia keeps separate models for mixed use and read-intensive use. Apparently the price is the same (I'm looking at the CM6), the hardware is the same, and the firmware is tuned a bit differently. The read-intensive model has 20% more capacity, which can be explained by less overprovisioning. They could as well leave it to the user to select one of two modes during formatting.

Intel had separate models years ago too, but later they chose to let users decide. They also put out a nice explanation:

https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/white-papers/over-provisioning-nand-based-ssds-better-endurance-whitepaper.pdf