Huawei’s new stacking tech for high-capacity SSDs

Huawei has developed proprietary Die-on-Board (DoB) packaging technology to produce 122 TB SSDs, circumventing its inability to access the latest 100+ layer 3D NAND from mainstream suppliers due to US export restrictions. The technology stacks NAND dies directly onto a base printed circuit board, achieving a 33% capacity density improvement over traditional packaging methods. Huawei is now producing 61.44 TB and 122.88 TB SSDs for its OceanStor storage systems, with a 245 TB version in development, narrowing the capacity gap with rivals like Kioxia.

flash Huawei’s new stacking tech for high-capacity SSDs Huawei https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2025/11/03/huaweis-ai-focussed-all-flash-storage/1609725 has produced 122 TB SSDs without having access to the latest 100+ layer 3D NAND from mainstream NAND suppliers, and it has done this using proprietary Die-on-Board DoB packaging. DoB is a wafer-level packaging or assembly technology that places dies NAND dies for example directly onto a base printed circuit board PCB . Mainstream SSD suppliers, such as Samsung with V-NAND, Kioxia and Sandisk with BiCS, and Micron, use multi-die stacking inside TSOP, BGA or other packages. These are then soldered on to the base PCB. This is common in high-capacity SSDs which use multi-layer 3D NAND inside the die. Huawei cannot get access to the latest 3D NAND chips using US tech, as it is on the US Entity List. https://www.blocksandfiles.com/flash/2022/10/17/us-export-controls-may-cripple-ymtc-fabs/1606678 So, once its stockpile was used up, it has to use Chinese-made NAND from suppliers such as YMTC. Existing TSOP or BGA packaging for its SSDs would put them at a capacity disadvantage compared to mainstream SSDs. So it has innovated at the board-level packaging area, by stacking NAND dies in a single package directly placed on the board. This gets it greater capacity density than traditional NAND die packaging, through tighter integration of the NAND chips and reduced costs. The challenges in such packaging include thermal management and signal integrity. An analyst briefing at a Huawei ID Forum 2026 event in Paris talked about three high-capacity SSDs with 61.44 TB and 122.88 TB in production and a future 245 TB version. The event had an exhibition area, and this included the OceanDisk 1800 Smart Disk Enclosure. An accompanying data sheet mentioned it having 1.47 PB capacity in 2U using “Large capacity SSDs with DoB stacking technology.” A nearby OceanDisk 1610 display mentioned it having up to 2.2 PB from 36 x 61.44 TB SSDs in its 2 RU enclosure Huawei highlights DoB in a Data Storage 2030 https://www-file.huawei.com/-/media/corp2020/pdf/giv/2024/data storage whitepaper 2030 en.pdf white paper, on page 35, and it’s also mentioned in a prezi.com http://prezi.com pitch called “Transforming Enterprise Storage with Huawei OceanStor Dorado.” DoB is proprietary Huawei technology and provides a 33% capacity density improvement. It is used in the OceanStor Pacific 9926 AFA Scale-out storage with its OceanDisk QLC PCIe gen 4 SSDs and their 61.44 and 122 TB capacities. The number of layers is not disclosed. An inf.news report https://inf.news/en/tech/e4e6a36af4ce1427e390f57c1b400918.html discusses three Huawei AI SSDs; - EX 560 - extreme performance focus: 1.5M random write IOPS, sub-7 microsecs latency, 60 DWPD endurance - SP 560 - high performance: 600K random write IOPS, sub-7 microsecs latency, 1 DWPD - LC 560 - capacity focus: 245TB through 36-layer stacking process. 14.7bGB/sec bandwidth The report says that the 36-layer process “breaks the limitations of the traditional 16-layer process.” Huawei’s AI SSD architecture “integrates an AI acceleration unit into the SSD’s main control chip, enabling simultaneous storage and computing, reducing data transfer energy consumption by 80%.” Huawei’s OceanStor Pacific 9926 with 36 x 122.88 TB NVMe SSDs, using PCIe gen 5, provides 4.42 PB of raw capacity in its 2 RU chassis; 11 PB effective capacity with 2.5:1 compression. This contrasts with Dell’s 10 PB raw capacity https://www.blocksandfiles.com/flash/2026/05/14/kioxia-and-dell-cram-10-pb-into-slim-2ru-server/5240574 in a 2RU chassis using 40 x Kioxia LC9 QLC NVMe 245.88 TB SSDs. The LC9s are in the E3.L form factor whereas Huawei’s OceanDisk SSDs are in a proprietary, somewhat palm-sized package. DoB hasn’t yet allowed Huawei to catchup with the 245 TB SSDs from Kioxia and others, which are being sampled by hyperscalers, but it goes a long way towards that.