Kioxia CM7: Enterprise SSD with maximum PCIe 5 goes into production

The enterprise SSD Kioxia CM7, which was already shown as a prototype last year, will be produced in series. It is connected with PCIe 5 and reaches up to 14 GB/s, but not in all forms.

Kioxia CM7 SSD: Not blazing fast in all forms

Kioxia promised twice the performance of PCIe 4.0 in its introduction of the Kioxia CM7 last year. Thanks to PCIe 5.0 x4, more than 14 GB/s at peak should be possible. The enterprise SSD is offered in a classic form with U.2/U.3 connection and 30.72 TB capacity and in the E3.S format of the Enterprise & Datacenter Storage Form Factor (EDSFF). A maximum of 15.36 TB is possible here.

In terms of capacity, the device is on par with the Server SSD PM7. However, there is a bitter limitation in terms of speed, because only the E3.2 model uses the new PCIe 5.0 interface with 14 GB/s throughput. The U.3 model, on the other hand, still uses PCIe 4.0, which roughly halves the speeds.

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However, the manufacturer only mentions this very briefly in a footnote of the press release, which states “The 2.5-inch form factor with U.3 connectivity is limited by PCIe Gen 4 performance.”

Differences in durability as well

Differences between both variants of the Kioxia CM7 also exist in terms of durability. The enterprise SSD realizes the maximum capacity of 30.72 TB in models with Drive Write Per Day (DWPD). They are typically used when the SSDs have to perform a lot of read but only little write work.

If the write volume is higher, there is a variant with 3 DWDP, but only a maximum of 12.8 TB is available here. Otherwise, the models rely on NVME 2.0 and (limited) PCIe 5.0.

A dual port design is offered for applications with high availability, while the Flash Die Failure Protection is supposed to provide full reliability in case of a chip failure. Advanced features such as Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV), Controller Memory Buffer (CMB), multistream write capability are also supported.

The Kioxia CM7 series is already shipping to “select customers,” according to the manufacturer. However, prices were not named.