Kioxia Unveils LD4-Series E1.L SSDs with Up to 122.88TB Capacity for Hyperscalers

Kioxia launches LD4-series E1.L drives for hyperscale storage

Kioxia has introduced its LD4-series solid-state drives in the E1.L form factor, with capacities up to 122.88TB, designed for high-density storage deployments in hyperscale data centers. The new drives use the company's BiCS8 3D QLC NAND and are aimed at read-intensive workloads such as AI data repositories and object storage, according to the manufacturer.

Interface and platform details

The LD4-series SSDs rely on Kioxia's proprietary platform complying with the NVMe 2.0e specification. The drives feature a single-port configuration along with select requirements of the Open Compute Project Datacenter NVMe SSD specification 2.6. Although Kioxia lists PCIe 5.0 compliance, the drives operate at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds of up to 16 GT/s per lane, which provides a theoretical maximum bandwidth of approximately 7.88 GB/s in each direction.

While Kioxia currently offers capacities of up to 30.72 TB, the company has validated an architecture capable of supporting 122.88 TB drives. It has not revealed when such drives will become available, which is not surprising in a market where 3D NAND memory is sold in advance.

Compact form factor targets dense 1U deployments

The key selling point of the E1.L form factor, measuring 318.75 mm in length, 38.4 mm in height and 9.5 mm in thickness, is its ability to house numerous 3D NAND flash packages on an elongated printed circuit board. This enables multiple drives to be installed in a thin 1U server, allowing system manufacturers building OCP-compliant servers to maximize storage capacity without increasing rack space requirements, which is particularly important for large-scale storage deployments.

Specifications remain undisclosed as sampling begins

Kioxia has not disclosed performance characteristics of its LD4-series SSDs, including sequential read and write speeds, random read and write IOPS, or latency. The company also did not reveal endurance ratings in drive writes per day or total bytes written, nor did it specify power consumption, characteristics that are particularly important for hyperscale operators evaluating the cost, performance and longevity of storage infrastructure.

Kioxia is currently sampling 15.36 TB and 30.72 TB LD4 drives to select customers and has not disclosed when 122.88 TB configurations will become available or when the series will enter mass production. The drives will be demonstrated at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose in mid-October.

Sources: Tomshardware