Kioxia Unveils XD8 Series Data Center PCIe 5 SSDs At A Speedy 12.5GB/s

Kioxia is launching another round of zippy solid state drives for the data center that leverage the PCI Express 5.0 bus, and namely the XD8 series. While you won't find these being offered for consumer desktops or laptops—the come in the Enterprise and Data Center Standard Form Factor (EDSFF)—they offer impressive speeds that are up there with some of the fastest storage products on the market, albeit not the absolute fastest.

The KD8 series also represent Kioxia's third generation of E1.S SSD models, with NVMe 2.0 compliance and support for the Open Compute Project (OCP) data center NVMe SSD v2.5 specification. They're built specifically for cloud and hyperscale environments, and offer sequential read speeds of up to 12.5GB/s (12,500MB/s). That's a 73% improvement over the previous generation and is pretty darn fast, even if not quite on the level of, say, MSI's Spatium M580 FROZR, which is rated to hit reads of up to 14.6GB/s (14,600MB/s).

Sequential write speeds, meanwhile, receive a more modest 20% speed increase over the previous generation, with Kioxia saying the XD8 series can hit up to 5.8GB/s (5,800MB/s). That's not especially fast compared to higher-end consumer drives, though in a cloud environment, reads (when a user and applications retrieve data from a device) are typically more important than writes. Additionally, a 5.8GB/s write speed isn't in an of itself slow by any means, especially compared to mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs).

Finally, in terms of raw performance, Kioxia rates the 4K random read performance at up to 2.3 million IOPS, which is a 48% improvement over its last-gen models, and 4K random write performance at up to 250,000 IOPS for a 25% speed uptick versus last-gen.

"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," Ichhaporia added.

As far as thermal management goes, Kioxia is offering its EDSFF E1.S form factor models with three heatsink options, as pictured up top, including 9.5mm, 15mm, and 25mm. Cooling is obviously of vital importance in a data center environment, but even more so when tapping into the high speeds offered by the PCIe 5.0 bus.

Kioxia says its XD8 series will ship in 1.92TB, 3.84TB, and 7.68TB capacities, with evaluation models already sampling to customers.