Kioxia has announced its LC9 SSD family, aimed at data centers and enterprise-class systems. The drives are designed primarily to support workloads related to generative AI and large language models (LLM).
The products are based on the eighth-generation Kioxia QLC BiCS Flash 3D flash memory chips with a density of 2 Tbit and CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology. Kioxia was able to achieve vertical and horizontal scaling of the memory crystal using patented processes and innovative architectures. The SSD capacity reaches 122.88 TB.
The devices are made in the SFF U.2 format, and the PCIe 5.0 (NVMe 2.0) interface is used for data exchange: PCIe x4 (one port) or PCIe 2 × x2 (two ports) configurations are possible. The drive can withstand 0.3 rewrites per day (DWPD indicator), which is slightly less than 37 TB per day or 1.5 TB per hour throughout its service life.
Image source: Kioxia
The LC9 is said to be compatible with AiSAQ (All-in-Storage ANNS with Product Quantization), where ANNS is a new “approximate nearest neighbor search” algorithm optimized for SSDs. AiSAQ delivers scalable performance for augmented array generation (RAG) by performing searches directly on the SSD without placing index data in DRAM. This enables large-scale databases to run without relying on limited RAM resources. Vector databases can also be started quickly without having to load index information into DRAM.
It should be noted that SSDs with a capacity of over 120 TB have already been announced by other manufacturers, in particular, Solidigm, Phison and Western Digital. At the same time, the Solidigm D5-P5336 devices are equipped with a PCIe 4.0 interface, and the Phison Pascari D200V – PCIe 5.0.