Kioxia 2nd Gen XL-NAND flash memory up to 13.5 GB/s seq reads and 3M IOPS random reads

During the 2023 China Flash Market conference (CFM), Kioxia revealed its newest enterprise SSD powered by 2nd Gen XL-NAND flash memory. This cutting-edge technology promises sequential read speeds of up to 13.5 GB/s on drives featuring PCIe Gen 5 x4 interfaces.

This is a significant improvement over the first generation of Gen 5 SSDs, which only offer speeds of 12-12.5 GB/s. Kioxia’s latest offering also boasts an impressive 118% increase in performance compared to its current crop of Gen 4 x4 SSDs. Additionally, the drive offers sequential write speeds of up to 9.7 GB/s. While sequential speeds are impressive, enterprise customers prioritize 4K random-access performance. Here, the drive offers up to 3 million IOPS random reads, with up to 1.06 million IOPS sequential writes.

Despite the impressive performance gains, read-latency has been slightly reduced to 27 µs, compared to 29 µs for the previous generation. Kioxia anticipates that PCIe Gen 5 and CXL 1.0 will continue to be the I/O interfaces for enterprise SSDs until the end of 2025. However, by 2026, PCIe Gen 6 is expected to emerge in the enterprise space, promising a doubling in interface bandwidth.