Kioxia unveils E1.L SSDs for hyperscalers with up to 122.88TB capacity

What happened

Kioxia introduced its LD4-series solid-state drives (SSDs) in an E1.L form factor with capacities up to 122.88TB designed for high-density storage deployments in hyperscale data centers (a building full of computers that runs online services) on Friday. While the company currently offers capacities of up to 30.72 TB, it has validated an architecture capable of supporting 122.88 TB drives, though it never revealed when such drives are set to be available, something not surprising in a world where 3D NAND memory is sold in advance.

Kioxia's LD4-series SSDs can store up to 122.88TB of data in a compact form-factor, but its performance remains a mystery. The new drives use proven BiCS8 3D QLC NAND and are aimed at read-intensive workloads like AI data repositories and object storage, according to the manufacturer. Although Kioxia lists PCIe 5.0 compliance, the drives operate at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds of up to 16 GT/s per lane, which provides a theoretical maximum bandwidth of approximately 7.88 GB/s in each direction.

Key facts

• Kioxia — introduced: its LD4-series solid-state drives (SSDs) in an E1.L form factor with capacities up to 122.88TB designed for high-density storage deployments in hyperscale data centers on Friday