Kioxia CD8P SSDs Tap PCIe 5 And Huge 30TB Capacity For Data Center Storage

Kioxia CD8P SSDs on an orange background.
The data center is the unsung hero of modern computing, in that so many tasks rely on them (cloud gaming, online shopping, and so forth) but they often take a back seat to local devices. Back seat or not, it's important to keep data centers fed with high-tech hardware, and that's what Kioxia is delivering with its upgraded CD8P series of solid state drive (SSD) storage.

In short, the CD8P series is a single-port, data center class SSD incorporating PCI Express 5.0 and NVMe 2.0 technologies. By making the jump to PCIe 5.0, Kioxia says its latest-generation SSDs deliver anywhere from 60-80% faster sequential read performance compared to the previous generation lineup.

Slide outlining specs and features for Kioxia's CD8P series data center SSDs.

To be more specific, Kioxia says its CD8P SSDs can deliver up to 12,000MB/s (12GB/s) of sequential read performance. Sequential writes are not quite as high, but still check in at a decent 5,500MB/s (5.5GB/s). Meanwhile, 4K random read and write metrics are rated at up to 2 million IOPS and 400,000 IOPS, respectively.

"We are proud to introduce our latest data center PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, for general-purpose server and cloud applications," said Neville Ichhaporia, senior vice president and general manager of the SSD business unit, KIOXIA America, Inc. "The CD8P Series is ready for next-gen PCIe 5.0 servers, delivering a great combination of high performance with low latency in both E3.S and 2.5-inch form factors."

These 5th generation data center drives are built around Kioxia's own BiCS Flash 3D triple-level cell (TLC) memory chips and paired with a proprietary controller developed in-house. For those unaware, Kioxia was spun out of Toshiba and OCZ, the latter of which Toshiba acquired nearly a decade ago.

Kioxia will offer two versions of the CD8P series, including CD8P-V models in capacities up to 12.8TB for mixed used workloads, and CD8P-R models in capacities up to 30.72TB that are tuned for read intensive data center environments. The drives are sampling to customers now.