Kioxia CM9-R Throughput and IOPS
Moving to more traditional testing, here are the sequential 128K read and write results using the best results we could find in a sweep.
The Kioxia CM9-R achieved 14.9GB/s read and 11.3GB/s write speeds. This compares to the CD9P-R, which recorded similar read speeds but “only” 7.2GB/s writes. Kioxia’s specs say up to 14,800MB/s read, and 11,000MB/s write, but like most modern drives, we got slightly higher results.
Throughout the range, we get very solid read speeds, but starting at about an OIO of 16, we get awesome results from the drive.
On the write side, being able to hit over 11GB/s even at lower OIO ranges is solid.
Moving to 4K random workloads, we have a 50/50 and 70/30 read/write split as well as 100% read and 100% write.
Really, the only bar in our comparison set that is above the CM9-R is the heavily overprovisioned Phison Pascari X200E 6.4TB. We included it in the dataset, so we figured we would include it. Still, it is a different class of SSD that reserves much more NAND for overprovisioning. As a result, it follows a different $/TB curve, since more NAND on that drive is not used for storage.
Getting to some of the curves, here is the random 4K read curve:
Here is the random write curve.
Notably, while at higher OIO the CM9-R is not as fast as the X200E, it is actually doing really well at the lower OIO levels even as a read-focused drive.
On the mixed workloads, we actually see the Kioxia drive perform extremely well, including at higher OIO.
Here are the same workloads with 8K blocks.
Again, with a read-focused drive like the CM9-R, this is a top-tier PCIe Gen5 read- and mixed-workload-focused drive. You can see that at the random 8K read level it is in the top tier, but as more writes get mixed in, the more write-focused drive can come out ahead. To be fair, Kioxia has the CM9-V series with 3 DWPD but would only have 12.8TB of capacity instead of 15.36TB in this class. We would expect the mixed workload CM9-V to do a bit better here. Still, among the other read-focused 1 DWPD drives, Kioxia’s CM9-R is cooking.
Here is the write IOPS side:
Here is the mixed 70/30 at 8K random:
Here is the 50/50 mix at 8K:
Overall, this CM9-R is a very fast drive.
Next, let us get to the latency side.
