Kioxia LC9 Is The World's First 245TB SSD For Insatiable AI Storage Demands
Kioxia is not messing around with its latest ultra high-capacity solid state drive (SSD) offerings for the enterprise. To wit, the company announced it is expanding its LC9 series with what it rightfully claims is the industry's first 245.76TB NVMe SSD in both 2.5-inch and Enterprise and Datacenter Standard Form Factor (EDSFF) E3.L designs.
The new capacity and compact E3.L form factor option join Kioxia's previously announced 122.88TB model (available in 2.5-inch and E3.S form factors), all of which are purpose built for generative AI storage needs.
"Generative AI places unique demands on storage, including the need to store vast datasets for training large language models (LLMs), and to create embeddings and vector databases that support inference through retrieval augmented generation (RAG). These workloads require storage solutions with large capacity, high speed, and exceptional power efficiency," Kioxia explains.
In terms of performance, the LC9 features a PCI Express 5.0 x4 interface and a 32-die stack of 2 terabit (Tb) BiCS Flash quad-level cell (QLC) 3D flash memory (so 8TB per 154 BGA package) with CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) tech to deliver up to 12,000MB/s of sequential read performance and a more modest 3,000MB/s for sequential writes.
Meanwhile, random data access is rated at 1.3 million IOPS for reads and 50,000 IOPS for writes. None of these are going to set any speed benchmarks compared to the fastest consumer NVMe models on the market (or even Kioxia's own CD9P series), but they're still performant and obviously offer a ton of capacity for the data center. It should also be noted that reads are typically far more important than writes in the data center.
Other notable features include failure recovery at the die level, parity-based error management, AES-256 encryption, power loss protection, and an endurance rating of 0.3 drive writes per day.
Kioxia says it is currently sampling its LC9 series SSDs to select customers.
