Just over a week ago, we covered the new Kioxia LC9 122.88TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD. At NVIDIA GTC 2025, we were able to see one in person. Since last week, we only had a stock image that we turned into a cover we figured it was worth showing off photos of the actual drive.
Kioxia LC9 122.88TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD at NVIDIA GTC 2025
We asked Kioxia, and they let us take the high-capacity Kioxia LC9 out of the display case with other SSDs. This one is notable since it is still a 2.5″ form factor, but it packs 122.88TB of storage capacity.
The other notable feature with this is that it is a PCIe Gen5 drive. We have seen some other 122.88TB drives launch with an older PCIe Gen4 interface. The Gen5 interface can be configured into either a single x4 for standard servers or x2x2 for dual-ported high-availability deployments.
Hitting that 122.88TB of capacity means using the new Kioxia 2Tb QLC BiCS FLASH generation 8 3D flash memory. We get a 0.3DWPD endurance rating for around 1.5TB/ hour of write endurance per drive.
Final Words
It is always fun to see the new high-capacity drives at shows. It will probably take a few months (but who knows) until we get one of these in the STH lab.
Hopefully we will get to do something fun with them over this summer. One challenge is that the high-capacity SSD market is so hot because the drives are selling out as fast as SSD providers can make them.
If you want to see why these high-capacity SSDs are so popular, check out our Axautik Group LLC newsletter:
So the write speed is about 416MB/s per drive? Based on the 1.5TB per hour figure, that means 25GB per minute or 416MB per second?
I think that’s just the endurance, like you’d be able to write 1.5 TB/hour for the duration of the warranty and not run out of the rated write cycles.