Kioxia is joining the high-capacity NVMe SSD game. The Kioxia LC9 is the company’s new 122.88TB SSD designed for high-capacity and high-density AI clusters. It is also a new entrant bumping interface speeds to the faster PCIe Gen5 NVMe spec.
Kioxia LC9 is the 122.88TB PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD
The new LC9 is designed to fit 122.88TB of capacity into a standard 2.5″ SSD form factor. This may not seem like a big deal, but the 2.5″ form factor has become the battleground for these high-capacity NVMe SSDs over even E3 or E1 EDSFF form factors.
On the interface side, the drive supports PCIe Gen5, giving it a faster interface than some rivals like the Solidigm D5-P5336. That PCIe Gen5 interface is also a dual-port interface that can run in either a single port x4 or in a dual port 2×2 configuration.
Hitting that 122.88TB of capacity means using the Kioxia 2Tb QLC BiCS FLASH generation 8 3D flash memory with COSMOS directly bonded to array or CBA technology. That is a mouthful. Even with using QLC, the new drive offers a 0.3DWPD endurance which comes out to just under 37TB/day or 1.5TB/ hour for the drive’s entire lifetime. For some context, that would be writing more data each day than the largest hard drives currently can store in 3.5″ form factors. That is one reason we think that moving to TBW or PBW is a more useful metric than DWPD with these large capacity drives.
Final Words
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″ drive form factor really highlights the advantage of flash in these systems.
If you want to see why these high-capacity SSDs are so popular, check out our Axautik Group LLC newsletter:
![Pinterest](https://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=https://www.servethehome.com/kioxia-lc9-is-the-122-88tb-pcie-gen5-nvme-ssd/&media=https://www.servethehome.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Kioxia-LC9-Cover.jpg&description=The Kioxia LC9 offers 122.88TB of PCIe Gen5 NVMe storage in a 2.5" form factor for high-density and high-performance AI storage arrays){kind=link}
Hope that the lower seqment of these drives get cheaper, been looking at the CM7, CD8 etc but the prices are rediculous, also PCIe 5.0 cabling can hardly be found for these drive.
These stupid captas on this site are getting on my nerves..
I still think good AMD embedded solution with 10/25GbE and 16x or more PCIe4 lanes for a few SSDs would make an amazing “prosumer” level NAS solution.
You can /almost/ cobble together such a solution with an AMD epyc embedded SBC + something like the IcyDock MB699VP-B. https://global.icydock.com/product_182.html
I’d just like someone to take the time to properly put it in a clean case. Last time I attempted to fabricate my own custom SBC nas case, it was… not super usable. Not to mention that IcyDock solution is not as breathable as I would like for something like U.3 drives.
This is only PCIe 3.0 connectivity, but still otherwise wildly overkill for a 10GbE solution and a couple of U.3 drives in RAID1 plus a hotspare.
https://www.asrockrack.com/general/productdetail.asp?Model=EPYC3451D4I2-2T#Specifications
Any info on price?
anyone else starting to feel like PCIe Gen 5 is where we are really starting to push the boundaries of passive cabling/backplanes? I’m seeing a lot of variability in throughput speeds depending on whether I look at the cable wrong or not.