Kioxia CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD Up to 30.7TB Enterprise and Up to 15.4TB Data Center 2.5-Inch SSDs Shipping

The PCIe 4.0 spec was designed to double the performance of server and storage systems, pushing speeds up to 16.0 gigatransfers per second (GT/s) or 2Gb/s throughput per lane, and driving performance levels for cloud and enterprise applications.

Kioxia America, Inc. (formerly Toshiba Memory America, Inc.) announced that its lineup of CM6 and CD6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVMe enterprise and data center SSDs are shipping to customers.

In developing PCIe and NVMe SSDs, the company delivers performance. The firm was the first one to publicly demonstrate PCIe 4.0 SSDs and is now the first to ship these next-gen drives. The CM6 and CD6 Series SSDs are compliant to the latest NVMe spec, and include features such as in-band NVMe-MI, persistent event log, namespace granularity, and shared stream writes. Additionally, both drives are SFF-TA-1001 conformant (also known as U.3), which allows them to be used in tri-mode enabled backplanes, which can accept SAS, SATA or NVMe SSDs.

“AMD is leading the PCIe 4.0 charge with AMD EPYC, which is poised to bring in a new era of compute, graphics, networking, and storage in the data center,” said Raghu Nambiar, corporate VP, datacenter ecosystems and application engineering, AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.). “We are pleased to work with Kioxia and their PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSDs demonstrating industry leading performance and TCO while creating new application value for our customers ⁽¹⁾.”

“A new wave of storage technology is coming with the introduction of PCIe 4.0 devices that will bring next-gen performance to enterprise and hyperscale data centers,” said Jeff Janukowicz, research VP, IDC. “SSDs, such as Kioxia’s CM6 and CD6 Series, will help enable customers’ transitions to PCIe 4.0 and grow PCIe SSD unit shipments to over 50% of the enterprise market.“

CM6 Series enterprise NVMe SSDs
Dual-ported for HA, the CM6 Series of PCIe Gen4 (1×4, 2×2) and NVMe enterprise SSDs delivers sequential and random performance of up to 6.9GB/s and up to 1.4 million IO/s ⁽²⁾. These represent bandwidth improvements of up to 2x over its PCIe Gen3 predecessors and are 12x faster than typical SATA drives ⁽³⁾. Designed for enterprise applications and use cases – including HPC, AI, caching layer, financial trading, and data analytics, the CM6 Series is available in capacities from 800GB to 30.72TB, with 50% more capacity and 23x the throughput, in 27% of the space of the highest capacity HDDs.

CD6 Series data center NVMe SSDs
The CD6 Series of PCIe Gen4 (1×4) and NVMe data center SSDs are single-ported for servers, and targeted to large-scale data center deployments and general purpose applications, such as database, cloud computing, virtualized and containerized environments, web servers, and media streaming. Capacities from 960GB to 15.36TB, with 1.0 million IO/s and 6.2GB/s throughput are available.

Both the CM6 and CD6 Series include a range of security and encryption options, including Self-Encryption (SED) and FIPS, and are on the UNH-IOL Integrator’s list for NVMe 1.4 device compatibility. The CM6 has passed PCI-SIG Workshop compliance.

“For more than a year, OEM customers have been providing cutting-edge storage performance to end-users thanks to Kioxia’s CM5 and CD5 Series NVMe SSDs,” noted Alvaro Toledo, VP, SSD marketing and product planning, Kioxia America. “We’re continuing our commitment to lead in the NVMe space by delivering the fastest available 2.5-inch ⁽⁴⁾ PCIe 4.0 SSD solutions.“

⁽¹⁾ Industry leading 50GB/s performance demonstrated at MS Ignite, November 2019. Configuration tested with AMD-based server from QCT, Tri-mode HBA from Broadcom and 8 KIOXIA CM6 Series NVMe/PCIe SSDs, running a performance benchmarks in Microsoft Azure environment.
⁽²⁾ Performance estimates are preliminary and subject to change without notice
⁽³⁾ CM6 Series comparison to a HDD drive is based on publically available data. HDD form factor spec: industry standard 3.5″ form factor (101x146x41mm). Highest capacity HDD is a 20TB (WD Ultrastar DC HC620). Fastest HDD burst performance is 300MB/s.
⁽⁴⁾ 2.5-inch indicates the form factor of the SSD. It does not indicate drive’s physical size.

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