Kioxia BG5 Brings a Next-gen SSD to a Small Form Factor

The Kioxia BG5 is bringing a PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD to a low-cost and small footprint NVMe SSD. We previously looked at the, then Toshiba, BG4 that brought a single package SSD to a M.2 2230 30mm SSD form factor. Now, Kioxia has a follow-on with some big upgrades.

Kioxia BG5 Brings a Next-gen SSD to a Small Form Factor

The SSD itself comes in 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB sizes. It supports PCIe Gen4, a big update over Gen3. The new interface aligns more closely with current-generation platforms, however we are starting to see PCIe Gen5 platforms make their way to the market. Kioxia says the new BG5 is good for up to 3.5GB/s and 2.9GB/s of sequential write performance. One can also get up to half a million random read IOPS and 450K random write IOPS.

This week with Supercomputing 2021 we are going to talk about high-bandwidth memory or HBM. The BG5 support HMB which is short for host memory buffer. This NVMe spec allows for a DRAM-less SSD to utilize system DRAM as cache. The drive also supports Power Loss Notification signal that helps to protect data against forced shut downs given the off-card cache.

Final Words

Expect STH to have a review of this drive in 2022. Our 2021 is fairly full and we also need to wait to get a M.2 version of the drive. Still, upgrading even these cost-optimized SSDs to faster specs is a welcome improvement. These are not the fastest drives, but are ones we often see in systems in our Project TinyMiniMicro series.

Edit: Clarified some specs. Thanks to Ryan Smith at AnandTech for the catch.