The first reviews of Silicon Motion's new PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD controller, the SM2508 are starting to appear online, and the good news is that the controller is as power efficient as promised by the company. Tom's hardware has put up their review of a reference design M.2 SSD from Silicon Motion and in their testing, equipped with 1 TB of Kioxia's 162-layer BiCS6 TLC NAND. It easily bests the competition when it comes to power efficiency. In their file copy test, it draws nearly two watts less than its nearest competitor and as much as three watts less than the most power hungry drive. It's still using about one watt more than the best PCIe 4.0 drives, but it goes to show that the production nodes matters, as the SM2508 is produced on a 6 nm node, compared to 12 nm for Phison's E26.

We should point out that the peak power consumption did go over nine watts, but only one of the Phison E26 drives managed to stay below 10 watts here. The most power hungry PCIe 5.0 SSD controller in the test, the InnoGrit IG5666 peaks at nearly 14 watts for comparison. Idle power consumption of the SM2508 is also very good, still drawing more than the PCIe 4.0 drives it was tested against, but far less than any of the other PCIe 5.0 drives. What about performance you ask? The reference drive places itself ahead of all the Phison E26 drives when it comes to sequential file transfers, regardless if it's to or from the drive. Random read IOPS also places right at the top, but it's somewhat behind when it comes to random writes, without being a slow drive by any means. Overall we're looking at a very promising new SSD controller from Silicon Motion with the SM2508 and TPU has also received a sample that is currently undergoing testing, so expect a review here soon.

TrendForce reports that a reduction in supplier production has led to unmet demand for high-capacity orders since 4Q23. Combined with procurement strategies aimed at building low-cost inventory, this has driven orders and significantly boosted enterprise SSD revenue, which reached US$3.758 billion in 1Q24—a staggering 62.9% QoQ increase.

TrendForce further highlights that demand for high-capacity, driven by AI servers, has surged. North American clients increasingly adopt high-capacity QLC SSDs to replace HDDs, leading to over 20% growth in Q2 enterprise SSD bit procurement. This has also driven up Q2 enterprise SSD contract prices by more than 20%, with revenue expected to grow by another 20%.

Sabrent introduced the Rocket 2242 M.2 Gen 4 NVMe SSD. The drive is built in the M.2-2242 form-factor (42 mm long), which should make it suitable for certain kinds of handheld game consoles, such as the Legion Go. The Rocket 2242 comes in just one capacity for now, 1 TB. The drive combines a Phison E27T series DRAMless controller with Kioxia 162-layer 3D TLC NAND flash, and takes advantage of the PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface to offer sequential transfer speeds of up to 5000 MB/s. The company put out no other performance or endurance related specs. Sabrent is pricing the Rocket 2242 1 TB at USD $99.99, it is available now, and backed by a 5-year warranty.

Sabrent today debuted the Rocket 4 line of DRAMless M.2 NVMe Gen 4 SSDs. Built in the M.2-2280 form-factor, these drives take advantage of the PCI-Express 4.0 x4 host interface, and provide sequential transfer speeds of up to 7.4 GB/s reads, with up to 6.4 GB/s writes. The drives also offer 4K random access performance of up to 1 million IOPS reads, and 0.95 million IOPS writes. For now, Sabrent is launching 1 TB and 2 TB capacity variants of the Rocket 4, but the company is preparing to launch a larger 4 TB variant soon.

The Sabrent Rocket 4 combines a Phison E27T series DRAMless controller with Kioxia 162-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory (also known as the BiCS 6). There's just a copper foil heat spreader to keep things cool. The 12 nm E27T doesn't run anywhere near as hot as the E18, so you can make do with the heatsink your motherboard includes, or run it the way it is. The 1 TB variant is priced at $99.99, and the 2 TB variant at $199.99. The company didn't reveal pricing of the unreleased 4 TB variant.

KIOXIA is betting big on enterprise flash storage, and demoed several of its new and already-launched NVMe products based on the company's 162-layer 3D NAND flash memory, aka 6th Generation BiCS flash. Starting off, we see several single-chip solutions, namely the BiCS5 eTLC, the BiCS Industial TLC, and the BiCS5-QLC. These are complete NVMe SSDs on a single package, targeting embedded systems, industrial PCs, and the likes. They can even be directly embedded on server motherboards to serve as boot drives, freeing up precious chassis space for the main storage devices.

The EM6 is an enterprise network-attached SSD in a 2.5-inch form-factor. This is a NAS-on-a-stick that can be deployed at large scale, and accessible as a network resource, or as an NVMe-over-Fiber device. The CM7 is a high-capacity 2.5-inch (EDSFF E3.S) SSD that comes in sizes of up to 30 TB, and has PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface with NVMe 2.0 protocol, with endurance of up to 3 DWPD and offering FIPS 140-33 security. We also see the XD6 line of EDSFF E1.S form-factor NVMe SSDs with PCIe 4.0 interfaces, up to 3.84 TB capacity, and 1 DWPD endurance.

Kioxia Corporation and Western Digital Corporation today celebrated the opening of the state-of-the-art semiconductor fabrication facility, Fab7, at the Yokkaichi Plant in Mie Prefecture, Japan. Production capacity at Fab7 will ramp up in stages over time, in line with market trends. Total investment in phase one of Fab7 is expected to be approximately one trillion yen. Part of the capital investment in phase one of the Fab7 facility will be funded by a government subsidy that promotes cutting-edge semiconductor production facilities and ensures the stable production of semiconductors in Japan.

Fab7 has the capability to produce sixth-generation, 162-layer flash memory and future advanced 3D flash memory, is scheduled to start shipping 162-layer flash memory in early 2023. The facility uses artificial intelligence for enhanced production efficiencies and employs a space-efficient facility design that enlarges the space available for manufacturing equipment in its clean rooms. Fab7 is built for safety and sustainability, capable of absorbing earthquake shocks and implements the latest energy-saving manufacturing equipment.

According to a TrendForce investigations, memory pricing began to decline from 4Q21 due to weakening demand for certain consumer electronics. Coupled with the impact of rising inflation, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and pandemic policies, demand in peak season was weak, resulting in inventory pressure that has extended from the buyer side to manufacturers. In response to the aforementioned situation, Micron announced last week that it would cut production of DRAM and NAND Flash, becoming the first major memory manufacturer to officially reduce its capacity utilization plan. In terms of NAND Flash, the market situation is more severe than that of DRAM. As the average contract price of mainstream capacity wafers has fallen to their cash cost and is approaching the periphery of selling at a loss for various manufacturers, Kioxia also announced that it will reduce NAND Flash capacity utilization by 30% from October on the heels of Micron's announcement.

In terms of DRAM, current contract pricing remains higher than the total production cost of various mainstream suppliers. Therefore, compared with NAND Flash, it remains to be seen whether there will be a significant reduction in production. In addition to mentioning the slight reduction in capacity utilization in this sector currently, Micron mainly emphasized its sharp downward revision of capital expenditures in 2023 and that the annual growth of DRAM production bits next year will only be around 5%. TrendForce believes, according to Micron, to actualize such conservative bit growth means that there is still room for a significant downward revision in capacity utilization and the extent to which Micron's subsequent production reductions are implemented remains to be seen.

Here are some of the first pictures of the GoodRAM IRDM Ultimate PCIe Gen 5 M.2 NVMe SSD. Built in the M.2-2580 form-factor, the drive combines Phison's upcoming E26 controller, with what's likely KIOXIA 162-layer 3D TLC NAND flash memory. The controller takes advantage of the PCI-Express 5.0 x4 interface, and NVMe 2.0 protocol, offering sequential transfer speeds of around 10 GB/s reads, with around 9.5 GB/s writes. The drive comes in capacities of 1 TB, 2 TB, and 4 TB. It comes with a fairly large heatsink included. AMD Socket AM5 will be the first platform to feature CPU-attached PCIe Gen 5 M.2 slots, which goes on sale by late-September. The first PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSDs, according to AMD, should be here by November.

Kioxia Corporation and Western Digital Corporation announced today that their joint venture Fab 7 manufacturing facility at Yokkaichi Plant has been approved to receive up to 92.9 billion yen subsidy from the Japanese government. The subsidy will be granted under a designated government program aimed at facilitating corporate investment in cutting-edge semiconductor production facilities and securing stable production of semiconductors in Japan.

Leveraging their 20-year joint venture partnership, Kioxia and Western Digital will continue to accelerate the development and production of cutting-edge flash memory at the Yokkaichi Plant, the largest semiconductor plant in Japan. In addition, the two companies will contribute to the development of semiconductor-related industries and talent.

Last week, Micron revealed its NAND flash plans and so did Western Digital during its investors day. The different NAND flash manufacturers use similar, but far from identical ways to manufacture their NAND flash and WD is working together with Kioxia and the two are using a process called bit column stacked or BiCS NAND. This year the two companies will move to its sixth generation of BiCS NAND which is stacking 162-layers of NAND flash. Most of their competitors are already at 176-layer stacks, although WD and Kioxia still deliver the same capacity NAND chips as its competitors. WD claims that their die size is smaller than the competition, which could be an advantage due to more dies per wafer.

In its presentation, WD listed a single wafer capacity of 100 TB, which is an increase from around 70 TB per wafer in 2020. Although it's not something we can verify, WD claims to have the world's best charge trap cell, which the company claims leads to higher performance compared to its competitors. The slide provided by WD claims a 20 MB/s lead of the competition at 60 MB/s vs. 40 MB/s. Although Western Digital and Kioxia claim to have to invest less to increase their capacity, it would appear that they're behind the competition when it comes to the amount of layers they can stack. The two are only planning what they call BiCS+ at over 200-layers for 2024, which is well over a year behind Micron. The roadmap stretches all the way to 2032, when we should apparently be seeing 500-layer NAND flash, assuming everything goes according to plan. The first BiCS+ NAND will be for datacenter products and WD claims that their first product should see a 60 percent increase in transfer speeds, a 15 percent increase in program bandwidth and a 55 percent increase in bit growth per wafer over the current BiCS6 NAND.

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."