News Kioxia shows off new 122.88 TB SSD — PCIe 5.0 LC9 packs a whole lot of QLC NAND

[Admin]

Kioxia showed off it's new LC9 122.88 TB data center SSD, which comes in a 2.5-inch U.2 form factor and has two PCBs filled with NAND packages. We didn't get to see the internals, but there's a whole lot of BiCS 8 QLC NAND inside.

Kioxia shows off new 122.88 TB SSD — PCIe 5.0 LC9 packs a whole lot of QLC NAND : Read more

 

[heffeque]

Will this work on my DS918+ NAS?
(Just in case I'll clarify that I'm just kidding).

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Will this work on my DS918+ NAS?
(Just in case I'll clarify that I'm just kidding).

Yes, but only if you fill all four bays. (I don't think it supports the necessary U.2 connectors?)

Fun story: So at the booth, while photographing the LC9 123TB drive... it got bumped and fell to the floor. One of the Kioxia guys quips, "No worries, it only costs as much as a modest car..." LOL

I wouldn't be surprised if the sample drive that was sitting out is actually dead/defective just because stuff like that can happen. Like how AMD gave out Threadripper and Vega "trophies" using dead CPUs and GPUs back in the day.

I also tried to get them to let me open up the drive so I could photograph the internals. Mostly I wanted to see what they looked like. They wouldn't let me, probably would have gotten someone fired...

 

[Math Geek]

can't possibly cost that much. i see 128 tb thumb drives on amazon, wish, and other sites for only like $20. $40 maybe if it has a cool name with "ultra mega killer super gamer" in it.

 

[ChocoboGuy]

Yes, but only if you fill all four bays. (I don't think it supports the necessary U.2 connectors?)

Fun story: So at the booth, while photographing the LC9 123TB drive... it got bumped and fell to the floor. One of the Kioxia guys quips, "No worries, it only costs as much as a modest car..." LOL

I wouldn't be surprised if the sample drive that was sitting out is actually dead/defective just because stuff like that can happen. Like how AMD gave out Threadripper and Vega "trophies" using dead CPUs and GPUs back in the day.

I also tried to get them to let me open up the drive so I could photograph the internals. Mostly I wanted to see what they looked like. They wouldn't let me, probably would have gotten someone fired...

Assuming linear pricing (which is not how it actually works, but is good enough for a rough estimate).
A 15.36 TB drive on CDW is currently $3k, Link
So a 122 TB drive would be at least $24k. Personally I'd guess closer to the $30k-$40k range.

 

[thestryker]

Solidigm 61.44TB PCIe 4.0 drives are down to around $6k USD now so I imagine these are going to be around $15-18k (unless they're able to really fleece the market as retail availability on high capacity PCIe 5.0 is basically zero).

I keep hoping this thirst for enterprise NAND storage will mean the ~8-32TB used market can thrive. While I couldn't justify the cost required to replace the HDDs in my server box I'd love to get 1-2 high capacity PCIe SSDs.

 

[USAFRet]

can't possibly cost that much. i see 128 tb thumb drives on amazon, wish, and other sites for only like $20. $40 maybe if it has a cool name with "ultra mega killer super gamer" in it.

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Solidigm 61.44TB PCIe 4.0 drives are down to around $6k USD now so I imagine these are going to be around $15-18k (unless they're able to really fleece the market as retail availability on high capacity PCIe 5.0 is basically zero).

I keep hoping this thirst for enterprise NAND storage will mean the ~8-32TB used market can thrive. While I couldn't justify the cost required to replace the HDDs in my server box I'd love to get 1-2 high capacity PCIe SSDs.

Agreed. I'd love to see the 16TB market come way down. If they could come down into the $500 range for 16tb (about double the spinning rust cost) I could justify 4 of them for a nice 48TB raidz1 set.

 

[Greg7579]

Jared, I love your articles and reviews and lap them all up in order to keep my product and tech knowledge up to speed in a layman's sense. As I have told you before, I hate RAID or the thought of using any stack or array, and I am a photographer that has about 6.5 TB of data (raw image files). I built my PC with an 8TB M.2 PCIe4 main data drive and all of my data is on that drive. I back up to three internal 8TB Samsung SATA SSDs that are pretty cheap now. I also back up to one external 8TB M.2 PCIe 4 SSD in an external housing that I bought after one of your reviews. So I have my data all on one drive and synced with GoodSync to 4 other 8TB SSDs. The problem is, within 18 months I am going to need those 8TB drives to be 12TB. I ask you again (as I did a year ago), how long before I can buy a single M.2 PCIe 4 SSD that is bigger than 8TB? 10 or 12 TB would get me another 5 years. Otherwise, I am going to have to do what I don't want to do, and not have all the data on one sigle fast M.2 SSD drive backed up to other single large and fast stand-alone SSDs.

 

[HideOut]

can't possibly cost that much. i see 128 tb thumb drives on amazon, wish, and other sites for only like $20. $40 maybe if it has a cool name with "ultra mega killer super gamer" in it.

Congratulations. You are compairing wh at is likely a fake chinese thumb drive, on the USB 2.0 standard to one of the highest end SSD's in the world. Your compairing a Yugo to a Bolide.

 

[TechSpectrum]

Congratulations. You are compairing wh at is likely a fake chinese thumb drive, on the USB 2.0 standard to one of the highest end SSD's in the world. Your compairing a Yugo to a Bolide.

Uhm. I am pretty sure they were just being sarcastic/joking. 👀

 

[JarredWaltonGPU]

Jared, I love your articles and reviews and lap them all up in order to keep my product and tech knowledge up to speed in a layman's sense. As I have told you before, I hate RAID or the thought of using any stack or array, and I am a photographer that has about 6.5 TB of data (raw image files). I built my PC with an 8TB M.2 PCIe4 main data drive and all of my data is on that drive. I back up to three internal 8TB Samsung SATA SSDs that are pretty cheap now. I also back up to one external 8TB M.2 PCIe 4 SSD in an external housing that I bought after one of your reviews.

So I have my data all on one drive and synced with GoodSync to 4 other 8TB SSDs. The problem is, within 18 months I am going to need those 8TB drives to be 12TB. I ask you again (as I did a year ago), how long before I can buy a single M.2 PCIe 4 SSD that is bigger than 8TB? 10 or 12 TB would get me another 5 years. Otherwise, I am going to have to do what I don't want to do, and not have all the data on one sigle fast M.2 SSD drive backed up to other single large and fast stand-alone SSDs.

If you want a consumer SSD that's at least 12TB? I honestly don't know of anyone specifically talking about that. Even 8TB drives remain a relative rarity, with the WD Black SN850X probably being the best of the bunch right now (TLC plus decent price). Given the rate of change, which has clearly slowed down, I don't anticipate seeing 16TB or even 12TB consumer drives coming out any time soon.

Which means you're basically stuck looking to enterprise drives, which are available in much higher capacities but also cost a lot more. And they're not available in M.2 form factor, not surprisingly. You need either U.2 or the data center E1.S or similar connections.

The reason 16TB likely isn't coming any time soon in M.2 form factor comes down to power, price, and demand. The demand for non-data center use remains very niche. That means price has to go up. But the real issue is power. 8TB M.2 SSDs can average 8W or so of power, and M.2 can only sustain 11.55W. Doubling the NAND potentially increase power quite a bit. I think the controllers are probably using up to 5W, and everything else would be in the 3~5 watts range as well for an 8TB drive. Spikes in power draw can go much higher than 12W, but they're only allowed for very short durations (milliseconds) and are undesirable.

If you have 16TB of actively used NAND, for writes you could probably see sustained power use of 15W or more. We'd need power use of the NAND packages to come down, and that isn't really happening — NAND is going for more layers rather than smaller process nodes, with power remaining relatively constant AFAICT. QLC also tends to use more power on writes than TLC, due to the increased complexity of managing 16 voltage states rather than 8.

TLDR: You're probably going to need to come to grips with using RAID if you want a volume with a higher capacity. And I understand all the concerns with going that route, but I just don't see anyone really trying to get around it. If you can use data center drives, that's also an (expensive) option.

 

[Math Geek]

If you want a consumer SSD that's at least 12TB? I honestly don't know of anyone specifically talking about that. Even 8TB drives remain a relative rarity, with the WD Black SN850X probably being the best of the bunch right now (TLC plus decent price). Given the rate of change, which has clearly slowed down, I don't anticipate seeing 16TB or even 12TB consumer drives coming out any time soon.

Which means you're basically stuck looking to enterprise drives, which are available in much higher capacities but also cost a lot more. And they're not available in M.2 form factor, not surprisingly. You need either U.2 or the data center E1.S or similar connections.

The reason 16TB likely isn't coming any time soon in M.2 form factor comes down to power, price, and demand. The demand for non-data center use remains very niche. That means price has to go up. But the real issue is power. 8TB M.2 SSDs can average 8W or so of power, and M.2 can only sustain 11.55W. Doubling the NAND potentially increase power quite a bit. I think the controllers are probably using up to 5W, and everything else would be in the 3~5 watts range as well for an 8TB drive. Spikes in power draw can go much higher than 12W, but they're only allowed for very short durations (milliseconds) and are undesirable.

If you have 16TB of actively used NAND, for writes you could probably see sustained power use of 15W or more. We'd need power use of the NAND packages to come down, and that isn't really happening — NAND is going for more layers rather than smaller process nodes, with power remaining relatively constant AFAICT. QLC also tends to use more power on writes than TLC, due to the increased complexity of managing 16 voltage states rather than 8.

TLDR: You're probably going to need to come to grips with using RAID if you want a volume with a higher capacity. And I understand all the concerns with going that route, but I just don't see anyone really trying to get around it. If you can use data center drives, that's also an (expensive) option.

i was today's age when i learned all this.

 

[Math Geek]

Congratulations. You are compairing wh at is likely a fake chinese thumb drive, on the USB 2.0 standard to one of the highest end SSD's in the world. Your compairing a Yugo to a Bolide.

thanks for giving me a good laugh today. i needed that