The Kioxia XD8 family of SSDs with PCIe 5.0 interface presented today is the third in a series of company solutions produced in the rapidly gaining popularity of the compact EDSFF E1.S form factor. The main distinguishing feature of the new products is compliance with NVMe 2.0 standards and OCP 2.5 specifications.
XD8 is positioned as solutions for cloud environments and hyperscalers and is characterized, first of all, by high reading speed. This figure for the new Kioxia SSD reaches 12.5 GB/s, which is 73% higher than that of the previous generation XD7P models. Linear recording speed has also increased, although only by 20%. It reaches 5.8 GB/s. For random read operations with 4K blocks, up to 2.3 million IOPS are stated; for random write operations, the drives provide up to 250 thousand IOPS. This is 48% and 25% faster than the XD7P family in the same form factor.
The described SSDs are based on Kioxia’s own BiCS 3D TLC memory. XD8 have capacities of 1.92 TB, 3.84 TB or 7.68 TB. For them, the reliability is stated at the level of 1 complete rewrite per day during the five-year warranty period (1 DWPD), and the mean time between failures is 2 million hours. The operating temperature range extends from 0 to +70 °C. The drives support data encryption, including the TCG Opal 2.0 standard, as well as the NVMe-MI 1.2c management interface. There is protection against power failures.
Since heat dissipation is an important issue for high-speed SSDs with PCIe 5.0 support, Kioxia has provided three options for radiator cases with heights of 9.5 mm, 15 mm and 25 mm. The presence and height of fins depends on this indicator. Currently, the company is already supplying customers with trial samples of the new SSDs.