Kioxia has a new line of SSDs using its 8th generation of BiCS flash. The new Kioxia CM9 is targeting high performance and high capacities with improvements on both fronts.
Kioxia CM9 PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSDs Launched in 2.5in and E3.S
Using the new 8th Gen BiCS flash, these are Kioxia’s new drives that utilize CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology. That technology is said to lower the power consumption while increasing performance and density. Key specs of the new drives include:
- PCIe Gen5 interface
- 2.5″ and E3.S form factors
- Capacities of up to 61.44TB in 2.5″ and 30.72TB in E3.S
- 1 DWPD and 3 DWPD endurance ratings (likely capacity will differ)
- NVMe 2.0, NVMe-MITM 1.2c, and OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD 2.5
specification-compliant
In terms of performance, Kioxia says that the new drives should offer big speed-ups over the CM8 series with up to 65% more random write and 55% more random read performance and up to 95% higher sequential write performance. That is a huge difference in speed. For some performance specs:
- 128KB sequential performance at QD32 of up to 14.8GB/s read and 11
GB/s write - 4K Random performance up to 3,400 KIOPS at QD512) and 800 KIOPS at QD32
Kioxia also says that the new drives can be more power efficient as well.
Final Words
This is a big deal for Kioxia. The new drives offer significantly more performance per device which is important as we are now a few generations into PCIe Gen5 NVMe devices and have been seeing companies refresh lines with new faster offerings. The other major benefit to the new drives is the capacity. We covered the Kioxia LC9 122.88TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD at NVIDIA GTC 2025, but the new CM9 drives offer both performance as well as 61.44TB capacity. While there are some applications that demand the higher capacity drives, a higher performing 61.44TB drives is going to be attractive to many organizations out there. Hopefully we get to try the new drives in the future but we just reviewed the Kioxia CD8P-R 30.72TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD which you can check out.
I know it is probably an industry standard term at this point, but NVMe-MITM just says “NVMe Man in the middle” to me.
MITM attacks have been too prevalent for too long for my brain to read it any other way.
I would really love some sort of price indication for all these new drives. Although well versed in what ‘consumer’ storage costs I have absolutely no idea about the pricing for these things. Not even if they’re in the hundreds or the thousands. You may say that ‘if you don’t know it’s not for you’ but that sort of flies in the face having an informative web site. And to be honest, pricing is just as important as performance in the end.
$100-200 per TB will get you into the ballpark.