Kioxia is shipping engineering samples of a new short ruler SSD format that delivers 35 per cent better performance than the company’s coming PCIe 4.0 SSD.
The upcoming E3.S variant of the EDSFF (enterprise and data center SSD form factor), is an enterprise NVMe SSD developed for PCIe 5.0, according to Kioxia, and is intended for public cloud, hyperconverged and general purpose servers and all-flash arrays. The E3.S format has a higher power budget than today’s 2.5-inch SSDs and PCIe 3.0.
Kioxia’s sample E3.S system, based on its 2.5-inch CM6 Series PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1.4 SSD, exhibited 35 per cent more performance with the same controller, 4 PCIe lanes, 3D TLC flash memory and 28W (+40 per cent) of power.
The E3.S format is being standardised by a SNIA working group. E3.S SSDs should deliver more flash capacity in less space for more efficient use of power, rack space and storage footprint. They will feature:
- Support for PCIe 5.0 and beyond through improved signal integrity
- Better cooling, thermal characteristics and performance than 2.5-inch SSDs
- Drive status LED indicators
- Support for x8 PCIe lane configurations
There are short and long ruler standards with varying length, depth and width measurements; E1.L long ruler, E1.S (1-inch) short ruler and E3.S (3-inch) format, for example.
Intel is shipping the DC P4510 E1.l ruler format SSD and says it’s the only supplier shipping PCIe 4.0 drives currently.
