Kioxia releases PCIe Gen 5 SSD for data centers

Kioxia's second-generation PCIe Gen 5 SSD comes in a traditional form factor with added performance that's aimed at data center use cases.

The Kioxia CD8, released last week, is a follow-on to its first PCIe Gen 5 NVMe SSD, the CD7, which debuted last fall and comes in an Enterprise and Data Center SSD Form Factor (EDSFF). With the release of the CD8, the company brings the latest interface to a 2.5 inch, 15 mm form factor more common in data centers. The CD8 is based on fifth-generation BiCS Flash 3D NAND technology.

Jeff Janukowicz, an analyst at IDC, said PCIe SSD drives are becoming more prevalent in enterprise data centers. While they initially saw adoption from large cloud service providers, the drives have proven beneficial to server and storage array performance as well.

"PCIe Gen 5 SSDs, like Kioxia's new drive, bring a new set of advancements, and users will see increased speed and higher bandwidth, which will help boost performance for those data-intensive workloads," Janukowicz said.

Gen 5 aimed at Gen 4's market

While the CD8 is a PCIe Gen 5 product, the market demand and the hardware support for PCIe Gen 5 such as CPUs and motherboards aren't widely available yet, according to Ilya Cherkasov, senior product manager of the enterprise SSD division at Kioxia America, Inc.

"This drive does support Gen 5, but it's optimized around the Gen 4 x 4 performance level," Cherkasov said. The drives will support PCIe Gen 5 upon release, but, given the current lack of infrastructure for Gen 5, are currently best suited for Gen 4 with four lanes for data transfer.

PCIe Gen 5 technology will see more support from hardware vendors later this year, according to Cherkasov. Most customers are using PCIe Gen 3 today, with Gen 4 adoption starting to ramp up, he said. But Kioxia is preparing for the future of Gen 5, which it believes will start at the end of 2022 and potentially increase in 2023.

PCIe Gen 5 adoption is on the roadmap for all OEMs offering SSD technology, according to Don Jeanette, vice president at Trendfocus. Companies already offering PCIe Gen 4 will take advantage of advances such as CD8's added performance and begin to transition to the updated interface.

"It may not be a massive, all at once transition, but it nonetheless will happen," he said.

Mass adoption of Gen 5 is still a ways off, Jeanette said, "but it never hurts to have a solution already announced and ready."