The Kioxia CD8P is a new PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD. We now have a new set of 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Sapphire Rapids and AMD EPYC Genoa, Genoa-X, and Bergamo CPUs with PCIe Gen5 as well as the upcoming AmpereOne. The CPU and server side is ready, now it is time for the SSDs to follow suit. That is the market that Kioxia is aiming for.
Kioxia CD8P PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs Launched
Kioxia has two different variants of the CD8P. There is the higher endurance, but lower capacity, CD8P-V. The Kioxia CD8P-R is the read-focused variant of the SSD.
While we have seen companies like Solidigm with 61.44TB SSDs and Micron with multiple 30.72TB options. Kioxia is hitting 30.72TB but with a twist, this is a PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD with up to 12GB/s of read performance. The other big spec is the endurance. The Kioxia CD8P-V is a 3 DWPD drive with a lower capacity. The 30.72TB is only in the CD8P-R with a 1 DWPD rating and in the 2.5” form factor.
We took a look at the E3.S and other EDSFF form factors a few years ago in a video that is almost at 100,000 views.
The 2.5” form factor is still going strong, but EDSFF will become more popular as we move to PCIe Gen5 drives.
Final Words
In the industry now there are two sets of folks. Some believe that PCIe Gen4 is fine for a SSD. Those are also the companies that do not have PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs. Companies like Kioxia still see PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs to sell well this year, but are starting to transition their portfolios to Gen5. We will have a Kioxia CM7 review coming soon as well for those looking for other options.
At some point one has to, however, wonder about the endurance. 1 DWPD at 30.72TB versus 3 DWPD at 12.8TB may seem like a lot if just looking at DWPD, but 12.8TB x 3 = 38.4TB or roughly 25% more endurance than the larger drive. We see DWPD becoming less exciting in the industry as more drives start to crest >10TB capacities since at some point a lot of sequential read/ write data will end up finding its way onto SSDs instead of hard drives.
Hopefully we will get to see the Kioxia CD8P this week at Flash Memory Summit.
