Kioxia has introduced its new NX1 Series data center SSDs, bringing PCIe 5.0 performance to the E1.S form factor while adding support for direct liquid cooling for the first time. Designed for AI servers and hyperscale deployments, the NX1 Series replaces the company’s previous XD lineup and is built around a new in-house controller architecture that Kioxia says will also serve as the foundation for future enterprise SSD features.
Performance sees a healthy boost over the previous generation. Kioxia claims up to 38 percent higher sequential write speeds and as much as 20 percent better random write performance, helping keep pace with increasingly demanding AI and cloud workloads.
One of the more interesting additions is support for cold-plate direct liquid cooling on the 9.5mm E1.S models. As GPU servers continue to pack more accelerators into a single chassis, efficient cooling is becoming just as important as raw performance, and liquid-cooled SSDs are starting to appear alongside CPUs and GPUs in high-density AI systems.
The drives will be available in 9.5mm and 15mm E1.S form factors, with capacities ranging from 1.92TB up to 15.36TB. They offer 1 DWPD endurance and support PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0, the OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD 2.6 specification, and NVMe Flexible Data Placement (FDP). The NX1 Series also uses Kioxia’s eighth-generation BiCS FLASH TLC NAND with its CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) architecture, while self-encrypting drive models will be available for customers requiring hardware-based security.
E1.S form factor SSDs are becoming increasingly important for AI and hyperscale system designs, keeping high-speed flash storage close to the CPU and GPU,” said Neville Ichhaporia, senior vice president and general manager of the SSD business unit at KIOXIA America, Inc. “With the KIOXIA NX1 Series, we’re delivering the performance, thermal flexibility and storage density customers need to support the next generation of GPU-enabled infrastructure.
Kioxia says the NX1 Series is already sampling with select hyperscale customers and plans to showcase the new drives during the FMS: Future of Memory and Storage conference in Santa Clara next month.
