Kioxia CD8 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs Prepare for Next-Gen Servers

Kioxia launched new PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs this week. The new Kioxia CD8 series of NVMe SSDs is designed for servers that will become more common in the second half of this year. What is interesting is the target market.

Kioxia CD8 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD Launched

Checking out the specs of the SSDs, we see several intriguing points. First, these NVMe SSDs come in 2.5″ 15mm form factors. This is interesting since PCIe Gen5 generation is one where we would have expected EDSFF. Instead, we covered the Kioxia CD7 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD to fill the EDSFF role. This seems like a drive positioned more for enterprise servers for those organizations that have not switched to EDSFF.

From a performance perspective, we get 1.25M random read IOPS, and up to 7.2GB/s of sequential read/ 6GB/s of sequential write throughput. That is not full line rate PCIe Gen5, but it should be achievable on two PCIe Gen5 lanes allowing for higher density. Capacities range from 800GB to 15.36TB. There are two variants. The CD8-R is the read optimized variant with one drive write per day endurance while the CD8-V is the higher-end 3 DWPD offering. In comparison, modern data center hard drives with workload ratings are often in the 550TB/ year range for both reads and writes even on 20TB drives.

Final Words

Overall, we are excited for the PCIe Gen5 generation. These CD8 SSDs are being launched a bit ahead of when the platforms from AMD and Intel will launch. We expect for most of our STH readers, Sapphire Rapids and Genoa will be 2H 2022 platforms if they are early adopters. Still, there is a lot coming out in the world of servers, and so seeing the PCIe Gen5 ecosystem grow is always a good thing. Launching SSDs early means that they may ship with servers. We saw with PCIe Gen4 that some vendors launched SSDs well after AMD EPYC 7002 Rome and that delayed Gen4 adoption. We just hope these Kioxia CD8 SSDs are out alongside platforms so we can put Gen5 lanes to use.