Kioxia unveils its first PCIe 6.0 SSDs — up to 61.44 TB, but speeds not yet disclosed

Kioxia announced its first solid-state drives compliant with the PCIe 6.0 standard. The CM10 series drives use proprietary 322-layer BiCS FLASH TLC 10th-gen memory chips and are designed for enterprise servers and artificial intelligence infrastructure. The CM10 series will be available in E3.S, E1.S, and 2.5-inch form factors, with capacities ranging from 1.6 to 61.44 TB depending on model and form factor. The series includes high-read-intensity models rated for one full drive write per day and mixed-use models rated for three full drive writes per day. Kioxia claims the CM10 drives deliver up to 92% higher sequential read performance and up to 85% higher random read performance compared to the previous CM9 series. The company has not yet provided full data on transfer speeds or IOPS. The E3.S and E1.S models with 9.5mm thickness support direct liquid cooling but can also work with air cooling. The liquid-cooled designs target high-density AI systems where SSD performance and thermal limits affect server configuration. The drives support PCIe 6.0, NVMe 2.1, and some components of the Open Compute Project Datacenter NVMe SSD Specification 2.7, as well as NVMe Flexible Data Placement. Security features include self-encryption, FIPS 140-3 support, SPDM 1.4 attestation, and post-quantum cryptography recommended by CNSA 2.0. Kioxia states that the CM10 series supports NVIDIA's CMX architecture, which uses flash memory to expand the memory hierarchy beyond the GPU memory in a server. The drives are intended for AI tasks and storing context cache for AI models with large parameters and longer context windows. The 2.5-inch CM10 model is an exception: it uses PCIe 5.0 and older 8th-gen BiCS FLASH TLC memory. Kioxia is currently testing the CM10 drives with select customers.