Kioxia CM7 Series Enterprise NVMe 2.0 E3.S and 2.5-Inch PCIe 5.0 SSDs

In another move that delivers next-gen performance to enterprise data centers, Kioxia America, Inc. announced that its CM7 Series enterprise NVMe SSDs are shipping to select customers.

Optimized for performance, highly efficient servers and storage, the CM7 family is designed with PCIe 5.0 technology in Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.S and 2.5-inch ⁽¹⁾ form factors.

Having introduced the industry’s first EDSFF drives designed with PCIe 5.0 technology ⁽²⁾ last year, the addition of the CM7 family expands the firm’s position and allows OEM customers to deliver performance ⁽³⁾ to end users: The CM7 Series nearly saturates the PCIe 5.0 interface at 14GB/s read throughput.

“PCIe 5.0 will deliver new levels of performance and will usher in a wave of EDSFF form factor SSDs, helping to replace the 2.5-inch form factor for servers and storage,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research VP, IDC. “We expect the EDSFF form factor to grow to over 50% of enterprise SSD unit shipments by 2026. With the new CM7 Series family of SSDs, Kioxia is well positioned to capitalize on the transition to EDSFF.”

The CM7 Series is designed with data integrity protection, a host of security and availability features, and supports the demanding mission-critical workloads.

CM7 Series highlights include:

EDSFF E3.S and 2.5-inch 15mm Z-height form factors designed to the NVMe 2.0 and PCIe 5.0 specs
SFF-TA-1001 capable to support Universal Backplane Management enabled systems (also known as U.3)
Read-intensive (1 DWPD) capacities up to 30.72TB ⁽⁴⁾
Mixed-use (3 DWPD) capacities up to 12.80TB
Dual-port design for high availability applications
Flash Die Failure Protection maintains reliability in case of a die failure
Cutting-edge feature support – SR-IOV, CMB, Multistream writes, SGL
TCG-Opal SED feature set that is designed to comply with FIPS 140-3

“Applications such as AI, ML, and data analytics continue to drive the need for higher performance from the underlying storage stack, so that users can access, process, and manage data quickly, efficiently, and in real-time,” commented Neville Ichhaporia, VP, SSD marketing and product management, Kioxia America. “Our CM7 Series SSDs with PCIe 5.0 technology was designed to meet the demands of next generation use-cases. CM7 not only doubles performance from the prior generation but also offers an expanded set of form factor options, larger capacities, and premium features for our enterprise server and storage customers.”

⁽¹⁾ In 2.5-inch U.3 connectivity, transfer speed will be limited to PCIe Gen4. 2.5-inch indicates the form factor of the SSD and not its physical size.
⁽²⁾ As of November 8, 2021
⁽³⁾ As of July 15, 2022 based on Kioxia survey of publicly available information
⁽⁴⁾ Maximum capacity in E3.S is 15.72TB