At Computex 2025, the team saw the Innodisk 5QS-P. This is one of the company’s high-performance NVMe SSDs with the PCIe Gen5 interface and a lot of capcity. As a new 128TB/ 122.88TB class SSD, this is designed for high-density storage.
Innodisk 5QS-P is a 128TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD in E3.L
Our team in Taipei saw the Innodisk 5QS-P at the company’s booth among a number of other data center SSD products including E1.S, E3.S, M.2 and U.2 form factor drives.
Here is a closer look at the E3.L SSD.
Key specs are sequental read/ write at 12GB/s and 5GB/s but we did not see 4K random numbers. This is a QLC PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD. One benefit it has is that it can use up to 40W, which is more power than the U.2/ U.3 devices. The 25W power limit of 2.5″ devices is a challenge for high-capacity SSDs.
There was a bigger push at the show for the E3.L form factor SSDs. Chassis with the E3.L form factor can handle more NVMe devices in front hot swap bays. Additionally, by making the storage cages deeper than with the U.2/ U.3 form factor devices, one can have more flexibility with drives being used. We have seen chassis manufacturers use longer drive trays that either fit the E3.L form factor drives, or have additional spacers that fill the extra space when a shorter E3.S drive is fitted.
Final Words
Today, the 2.5″ form factors are extremely popular in high density storage, and the E1.S has been extremely popular in hyper-scale data centers displacing many M.2 and U.2 designs. In the future, the extra density offered by the E3.L form factor as well as higher power limits will help increase the performance of storage machines going forward. This still seems to be an early design from what we gather.
It has taken some time, but EDSFF is starting to take over.
