KIOXIA First to Deliver Enterprise and Data Center PCIe 4.0 U.3 Solid State Drives

Customers Now Qualifying Latest Generation of PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1.4 SSDs Driving up to 6,900MB/s Throughput

SAN JOSE, Calif., February 20, 2020 – The PCI Express® 4.0 specification was designed to double the performance of server and storage systems, pushing speeds up to 16.0 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) or 2 gigabytes per second (GB/s) throughput per lane, and driving new performance levels for cloud and enterprise applications. Today, KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) announced that its lineup of CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe® 4.0 NVM Express™ (NVMe™) enterprise and data center solid state drives (SSDs) are now shipping to customers.

An established leader in developing PCIe and NVMe SSDs, KIOXIA delivers never-before-seen performance. KIOXIA was the first company to publicly demonstrate PCIe 4.0 SSDs and is now the first to ship these next-generation drives. The CM6 and CD6 Series SSDs are compliant to the latest NVMe specification and include key features such as in-band NVMe-MI™, persistent event log, namespace granularity, and shared stream writes. Additionally, both drives are SFF-TA-1001 conformant (also known as U.3), which allows them to be used in tri-mode enabled backplanes, which can accept SAS, SATA or NVMe SSDs.

“AMD is leading the PCIe 4.0 charge with AMD EPYC, which is poised to bring in a new era of compute, graphics, networking, and storage in the data center,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate vice president, Datacenter Ecosystems & Application Engineering, AMD. “We are pleased to work with KIOXIA and their PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs demonstrating industry leading performance and TCO while creating new application value for our customers1.”

“A new wave of storage technology is coming with the introduction of PCIe 4.0 devices that will bring next-generation performance to enterprise and hyperscale data centers," said Jeff Janukowicz, research vice president at IDC. "SSDs, such as KIOXIA's CM6 and CD6 Series, will help enable customers’ transitions to PCIe 4.0 and grow PCIe SSD unit shipments to over 50% of the enterprise market."

CM6 Series Enterprise NVMe SSDs
Dual-ported for high-availability, KIOXIA’s CM6 Series of PCIe Gen4 (1x4, 2x2) and NVMe Enterprise SSDs delivers best-in-class sequential and random performance of up to 6.9 GB/s and up to 1.4M IOPS (input/output operations per second)2. These represent bandwidth improvements of up to 2x over its PCIe Gen3 predecessors and are 12x faster than typical SATA drives3. Designed for enterprise applications and use cases – including high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, caching layer, financial trading, and data analytics – the CM6 Series is available in capacities from 800GB to 30.72 terabytes (TB), with 50% more capacity and 23x the throughput, in only 27% of the space of the highest capacity hard disk drive.

CD6 Series Data Center NVMe SSDs
KIOXIA’s CD6 Series of PCIe Gen4 (1x4) and NVMe data center SSDs are single-ported for servers, and targeted to large-scale data center deployments and general purpose applications, such as database, cloud computing, virtualized and containerized environments, web servers, and media streaming. Capacities from 960GB to 15.36TB, with 1.0M IOPS and 6.2GB/s throughput are available.

Both the CM6 and CD6 Series include a broad range of security and encryption options, including Self-Encryption (SED) and FIPS, and are on the UNH-IOL Integrator’s list for NVMe 1.4 device compatibility. The CM6 has successfully passed PCI-SIG Workshop compliance.

“For more than a year, OEM customers have been providing cutting-edge storage performance to end-users thanks to KIOXIA’s CM5 and CD5 Series NVMe SSDs,” noted Alvaro Toledo, vice president of SSD marketing and product planning at KIOXIA America, Inc. “We’re continuing our commitment to lead in the NVMe space by delivering the fastest available 2.5-inch4 PCIe 4.0 SSD solutions.”

For more information, please visit americas.kioxia.com/en-us/business/ssd.

About KIOXIA America, Inc.
KIOXIA America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) is the U.S.-based subsidiary of KIOXIA Corporation, a leading worldwide supplier of flash memory and solid state drives (SSDs). From the invention of flash memory to today’s breakthrough BiCS FLASH™ 3D technology, KIOXIA continues to pioneer cutting-edge memory solutions and services that enrich people's lives and expand society's horizons. The company's innovative 3D flash memory technology, BiCS FLASH, is shaping the future of storage in high-density applications, including advanced smartphones, PCs, SSDs, automotive, and data centers. For more information, please visit KIOXIA.com.

Notes:
PCI Express and PCIe are registered trademarks of PCI-SIG.

NVM Express and NVMe, are trademarks of NVM Express, Inc.

All other company names, product names and service names may be trademarks of their respective companies.

Definition of capacity: KIOXIA Corporation defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes, a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes and a terabyte (TB) as 1,000,000,000,000 bytes. A computer operating system, however, reports storage capacity using powers of 2 for the definition of 1Gb = 2^30 bits = 1,073,741,824 bits, 1GB = 2^30 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes and 1TB = 2^40 bytes = 1,099,511,627,776 bytes and therefore shows less storage capacity. Available storage capacity (including examples of various media files) will vary based on file size, formatting, settings, software and operating system, and/or pre-installed software applications, or media content. Actual formatted capacity may vary.

1 Industry leading 50GB/s performance demonstrated at MS Ignite, November 2019. Configuration tested with AMD-based server from QCT, Tri-mode HBA from Broadcom and eight KIOXIA CM6 Series NVMe/PCIe SSDs, running a performance benchmarks in a Microsoft Azure environment.
2 Performance estimates are preliminary and subject to change without notice
3 CM6 Series comparison to a hard disk drive is based on publically available data.  Hard drive form factor specification:  industry standard 3.5” form factor (101mm x 146mm x 41).  Highest capacity HDD is a 20TB (WD Ultrastar DC HC620).  Fastest hard drive burst performance is 300MB/s.
4 2.5-inch indicates the form factor of the SSD. It does not indicate drive's physical size

  • Information in this press release, including product pricing and specifications, content of services, and contact information is current and believed to be accurate on the date of the announcement, but is subject to change without prior notice. Technical and application information contained here is subject to the most recent applicable KIOXIA product specifications.