Kioxia Sampling Upcoming CD9P Series 2.5-Inch EDSFF/E3.S Up to 61.44TB SSDs for Data Center

Kioxia America, Inc. announced the development and prototype demonstration of its new CD9P Series PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs.

These next-gen drives are the latest SSDs built with the company’s 8^th Gen BiCS FLASH TLC–based 3D flash memory. BiCS FLASH features CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology, a breakthrough architecture that boosts power efficiency, performance, and storage density, while doubling the capacity available ⁽¹⁾ per SSD compared with the previous-gen model.

As GPU-accelerated AI servers drive up the demands on storage infrastructure, maintaining high throughput, low latency, and consistent performance is critical – including keeping valuable GPUs highly utilized. The firm’s CD9P Series is purpose-built for these next-gen environments, delivering the speed and responsiveness required by AI, ML, and HPC workloads to ensure GPUs stay fed with data and operating at maximum efficiency.

The CD9P Series leverages Kioxia’s most advanced 3D flash memory to date, featuring a CBA-based architecture that reduces heat generation, enhances thermal management, and delivers greater overall value through improved performance, power metrics and total cost of ownership. With an increased focus on power and performance efficiency (performance/watt), the CD9P Series 15.36TB model delivers approximately 60% and 45% improvements in sequential RW speeds/watt, respectively, compared to the previous-gen SSD. It also achieves gains of approximately 55% and 100% in random RW performance per watt, measured in thousands of IOs (KIOs), respectively.

The CD9P Series drives deliver 4-corner performance improvements of up to approximately 125% in random write, 30% in random read, 20% in sequential read, and 25% in sequential write speeds compared to the previous-gen.

CD9P Series SSD highlights include:

PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0, NVMe-MI 1.2c compliant
Open Compute Project Datacenter NVMe SSD specification v2.5 support (not all requirements)
Form factors: 2.5-inch 15 mm thickness, EDSFF E3.S
Read-intensive (1 DWPD) and mixed-use (3 DWPD) endurances
Sequential performance (128KB@QD32) – 14.8GB/s read and 7GB/s write
Random performance (4KB@QD512) – 2,600 KIOs read and 750 KIOs (4KB@QD32) write
2.5-inch capacities up to 61.44TB and E3.S capacities up to 30.72TB
CNSA 2.0 signing algorithm support ⁽²⁾ (Prepared for the threat posed by Quantum Computers)

“The CD9P Series extends our NAND flash leadership with a solution engineered for today’s most demanding AI and accelerated computing environments,” said Neville Ichhaporia, SVP and GM, SSD business unit, Kioxia America. “By combining our CBA-based architecture with PCIe 5.0 performance, the CD9P Series helps keep GPUs consistently fed with data – significantly improving utilization while driving greater efficiency, responsiveness, and scalability across AI-driven data center workloads.”

Kioxia CD9P Series SSDs are sampling to select customers and will be showcased at HPE Discover Las Vegas 2025, Las Vegas, NV, taking place June 23–26.

⁽¹⁾ Compared to the previous-gen, 15.36TB model.
⁽²⁾ CD9P supports Leighton-Micali Signature (LMS) algorithm acknowledged by Commercial National Security Algorithm Suite 2.0 (CNSA) as a digital signature algorithm to prevent firmware tampering in preparation for threats to conventional cryptographic algorithms posed by quantum computers. Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256) with a key length of 256 bits, which is the data encryption algorithm used in CD9P, is also acknowledged by CNSA 2.0.