Hot on the heels of our Kioxia CD6 PCIe Gen4 Data Center SSD Review, we have a new product announcement on the consumer/ boot device side. The Kioxia XG6 is the company’s current generation drive and Kioxia says the newer generation will be faster with PCIe Gen4 and higher-capacity.
Kioxia XG7 and XG7-P
The new drives are M.2 2280 (80mm) PCIe Gen4 x4 drives that are part of the company’s “client class” devices. These drives Kioxia tends to also position in the data center as boot drives given the cost focus in that segment.
Kioxia did not provide speeds of each drive. However, we were given a clue in the press release line: “Built for demanding PC environments, the XG7/XG7-P Series offers 2x the sequential read speed and approximately 1.6x the sequential write speed of the PCIe Gen3 based XG6 Series.” This passage references the 1TB capacity XG6 and XG7. Here are the specs we found for the XG6:
Given that, we would put the read speeds in the 6-6.4GB/s range and the write speeds in the 4.75-5GB/s range for the new XG7 1TB drive. The Kioxia will have the same capacity points as noted on the XG6 above while the XG7-P will be available in 2048GB (2TB) or 4096GB (4TB) varieties.
Final Words
This is just part of our Flash Memory Summit 2020 coverage. We are going to see more from this drive as we move into the 2021 client refresh cycle and the data center market moves to use PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSDs as boot devices. For now, we have very little to go on for these new PCIe Gen4 BiCS NAND SSDs. We are trying to get a sample to test of these new drives hopefully in the first part of 2021 as they hit broader availability.
