Kioxia unveiled E1.L SSDs for hyperscalers with up to 122.88TB capacity in a compact form factor under its LD4-series, though performance details remain unclear.
Kioxia introduced its LD4-series solid-state drives (SSDs) on Friday in an E1.L form factor, with capacities of up to 122.88 TB. The drives are designed for high-density storage deployments in hyperscale data centers. According to the manufacturer, they use the company's proven BiCS8 3D QLC NAND and target read-intensive workloads such as AI data repositories and object storage.
The LD4-series relies on Kioxia's proprietary platform, which complies with the NVMe 2.0e specification and features a single-port configuration. It also meets select requirements of the Open Compute Project (OCP) 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. The company currently offers capacities of up to 30.72 TB, and it has validated an architecture capable of supporting 122.88 TB drives. It has not said when such drives will be available, which is unsurprising given that 3D NAND memory is often sold in advance.
Kioxia did not disclose any actual performance characteristics for the LD4-series, including sequential read and write speeds, random read and write IOPS, or latency. It also did not reveal endurance ratings in drive writes per day (DWPD) or total bytes written (TBW), nor did it specify power consumption. These characteristics are particularly important for hyperscale operators evaluating the cost, performance, and longevity of their storage infrastructure.
The key selling point of the LD4-series and its E1.L form factor, which measures 318.75 mm long, 38.4 mm high, and 9.5 mm thick, is its ability to house numerous 3D NAND flash packages on an elongated printed circuit board. This allows multiple drives to be installed in a thin 1U server, delivering large capacities. System manufacturers building OCP-compliant servers can therefore maximize storage capacity without increasing rack space requirements, which matters greatly for large-scale storage deployments.
Kioxia is currently sampling 15.36 TB and 30.72 TB LD4 drives to select customers. The company 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.