Exadrive’s 7-year reign as the largest HDD-replacement SSD ends as Kioxia debuts 122.88TB 2.5-inch SSD

LovabledanielsMarch 20, 202567 Views

Kioxia launches 122.88TB SSD with PCIe Gen5 and dual-port support
The LC9 Series NVMe SSD is designed for AI workloads and hyperscale storage
The new drive comes in a compact 2.5-inch form factor

After nearly seven years at the top, Nimbus Data’s massive Exadrive 100TB 2.5-inch SSD has been dethroned by Kioxia, which has unveiled a new 122.88TB model that not only offers a higher storage capacity but also supports PCIe Gen5, a first for this category.

Several companies have previously announced 120TB-class SSDs, including Solidigm, but Kioxia’s LC9 Series 122.88TB NVMe SSD stands out by pairing its ultra-high capacity with a compact 2.5-inch form factor and a next-gen interface with dual-port capability for fault tolerance or connectivity to multiple compute systems.

“AI workloads are stretching the capabilities of data storage, asking for larger capacities and swifter access to the extensive datasets found in today’s data lakes, and Kioxia is ready to offer the necessary advanced technologies including 2 Tb QLC BiCS FLASH generation 8 of 3D flash memory, CBA and the complimenting AiSAQ,” said Axel Störmann, VP & Chief Technology Officer for SSD and Embedded Memory products at Kioxia Europe GmbH.

Supporting AI system developers’ needs

The 122.88TB SSD is aimed at hyperscale storage systems, AI workloads, and other data-intensive applications that rely on capacity and speed. There’s no word on availability or pricing yet, but the company does plan to showcase the new drive at “various upcoming conferences”.

“This new LC9 Series NVMe SSD is an instrumental Kioxia product expansion that will support AI system developers’ needs for high-capacity storage, high performance, and energy efficiency for applications such as AI model training, inference, and Retrieval-Augmented Generation on a vaster scale,” Störmann said.

Reporting on the new SSD, ServeTheHome notes, “This is a hot segment of the market, and it is great to see Kioxia joining. As AI clusters get larger, the shared storage tier is usually measured in Exabytes. Teams have found that replacing hard drives with SSDs often reduces power, footprint, and TCO compared to running hybrid arrays. Moving from lower-capacity drives to the 122.88TB capacity in a 2.5-inch drive form factor really highlights the advantage of flash in these systems.”