Kioxia Unveils Plans for a 13.5 GB/s-capable PCIe Gen 5 x4 Enterprise SSD

[btarunr]

Kioxia, at the 2023 China Flash Market conference (CFM), unveiled its next-generation enterprise SSD powered by 2nd Gen XL-NAND flash memory that promises up to 13.5 GB/s of sequential reads on drives with PCIe Gen 5 x4 interfaces. This puts it higher than the 12-12.5 GB/s offered by the first crop of Gen 5 SSDs, and a 118% over its current crop of Gen 4 x4 SSDs. The drive also offers up to 9.7 GB/s of sequential writes.

4K random-access performance is of a lot more importance to enterprise customers, and here, the drive is said to offer up to 3 million IOPS random reads, with up to 1.06 million IOPS sequential writes. All this comes at a slightly reduced read-latency of 27 µs, compared to 29 µs for the previous generation. Kioxia also expects PCIe Gen 5 and CXL 1.0 to be the prominent I/O interfaces for enterprise SSDs from now until the end of 2025. It's only with 2026 that we could see the emergence of PCIe Gen 6 in the enterprise space, promising a doubling in interface bandwidth.



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[lemonadesoda]

Who is KIOXIA again? Is it ex Hitachi rebrand? I‘m glad I can type that question, because if I tried to say kioxia I‘m sure I could pronounce it a hundred ways and still get it wrong.

 

[n-ster]

I was hoping gen 5 SSDs would start using x2 or x1 lanes instead, but that does hurt backwards compatibility in terms of speed. Would be cool if there was a dual-mode with Gen 5 x1 to Gen 3 x4 or Gen 5 x2 to Gen 4 x4 or something

Who is KIOXIA again? Is it ex Hitachi rebrand?

Toshiba, they did a really good job at rebranding and going for the Enterprise segment, definitively a top-tier supplier IMO

 

[Solaris17]

Toshiba, they did a really good job at rebranding and going for the Enterprise segment, definitively a top-tier supplier IMO

Indeed, not that Toshiba was bad anyway. I run some toshibas in my smaller 60TB SAN.

 

[Wirko]

I was hoping gen 5 SSDs would start using x2 or x1 lanes instead, but that does hurt backwards compatibility in terms of speed. Would be cool if there was a dual-mode with Gen 5 x1 to Gen 3 x4 or Gen 5 x2 to Gen 4 x4 or something

It's fine as it is. A SSD with this kind of mixed PCIe interface could not be much cheaper than one with PCIe 5.0 x4.

On the other hand, it would be very, very nice if consumer CPUs and chipsets had better lane splitting abilities. Also, if PCIe x12 was somehow revived. It is (was?) part of the standard but never saw the light of day; could be used to split 16 lanes into 12 for the GPU and 4 for the SSD.

Even server CPUs have somewhat limited abilities in this regard. New Epycs can split each set of 16 lanes to 9 devices in various ways. New Xeons can split each set of 16 lanes to 8 devices by 2 lanes each, but in that case, PCIe 5.0 falls back to PCIe 4.0.