Kioxia CD7 SSDs we have seen a few times on STH. Today’s announcement is that the E3.S form factor drives have been validated on HPE’s portfolio. That means if you purchase a new HPE system, and want new PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs in the more modern E3.S EDSFF form factor, then Kioxia CD7 is now an option.
Kioxia CD7 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs Validated on HPE Servers and Storage
The Kioxia CD7 is a 1DWPD PCIe Gen5 x4 drive. Here is a shot of the drive we got at Intel Vision 2022 last year.
In terms of specs, here are some of the key specs.
Here is another slide from our Kioxia CD7 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD Launch piece.
These new drives are designed to work in HPE ProLiant Gen11 servers, HPE Alletra 4000 data storage servers, and the HPE Synergy 480 Gen11 Compute Modules. That means more HPE systems are able to use the CD7. We covered the HPE ProLiant Gen11 Servers with 4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Launched and HPE ProLiant Gen11 Kicks-off Again with AMD EPYC Genoa previously. We will have a ProLiant RL300 review later this month, but that is only a PCIe Gen4 system.
These drives are built to be used in servers like those from HPE so the fact that they are now validated gives Kioxia a win before the CD8 drives are out, and gives HPE customers the ability to use PCIe Gen5 devices beyond just 400GbE network adapters.
Final Words
One of the cool parts of this announcement is that these are E3.S NVMe SSDs. In 2021 we covered how E1 and E3 EDSFF were set to Take Over from M.2 and 2.5 in SSDs. That is now happening. You can see our video on this here:
That Kioxia E3.S SSD we showed in 2021 looks a lot like what is being announced today.
