Kioxia's new enterprise drives already near the limits of a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface

pcgamer.com:

Kioxia’s CM7 PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSD are now shipping to customers. The new SSD already nears maximum possible throughput of a PCIe 5.0 x4 interface with a read speed of nearly 14GB/s. Due to these almost near-futuristic specs, these drives give us a taste of what’s to come(opens in new tab) for the consumer segment. We’ll see a lot of drives around that 14GB/s mark over the coming years.

There are two CM7 drives, the CM7-V and CM7-R. The CM7-V is a mixed used version rated for up to three drive writes per day. It’s available in capacities ranging from 1.6TB to 12.8TB. The CM7-R is a read optimized drive available in capacities ranging from 1.92TB to up to a drool worthy 30.72TB.

These drives are designed for the enterprise market and will no doubt be very expensive, particularly the higher capacity versions. They’re meant for use with AMD’s 'Genoa' EPYC and Intel’s 'Sapphire Rapids' Xeon Scalable platforms, both of which support PCIe 5.0.

The drives are available in traditional 2.5-in form factors as well as the newer EDSFF form factor. This stands for Enterprise and Data Center SSD Form Factor. The enterprise SSD market is expected to transition to this new form factor over the coming years.

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It’s interesting that the drives are already shipping, given that PCIe 5.0 systems still aren’t available. To you and me that is. The drives are likely in the hands of OEMs or