Kioxia launches first PCIe gen 5 liquid-cooled SSD

Kioxia has launched the NX1, the first PCIe Gen 5 liquid-cooled SSD, designed for GPU-enabled servers and hyperscale data centers. The E1.S drive uses 218-layer BiCS Gen 8 3D NAND and offers capacities from 1.92 TB to 15.36 TB, with 38% faster sequential writes and 20% faster random writes than the prior XD series. Sampling has begun with select hyperscale customers, with a public debut at FMS 2026.

Kioxia launches first PCIe gen 5 liquid-cooled SSD Kioxia has announced a liquid-cooled NX1 SSD to provide high-performance, power-efficient storage for GPU-enabled servers and hyperscale data centers. It is an E1.S format drive, either 9.5mm or 15mm thick, supporting PCIe Gen 5.0.,NVMe 2.0, and the OCP Datacentre NVMe SSD v2.6 standard as well as NVMe Flexible Data Placement FDP https://www.blocksandfiles.com/flash/2024/10/16/kioxia-speeds-up-rocksdb-with-flexible-data-placement-ssd/1605004 . The NX1 is built from Kioxia’s 218-layer, BiCS gen 8, 3D NAND in TLC format and comes at 1.92, 3.84, 7.68, and 15.36 TB capacity points. It uses a Kioxia-developed controller and there is a self-encrypting drive option Neville Ichhaporia, SVP & GM of the Kioxia America SSD business unit, said: "E1.S form factor SSDs are becoming increasingly important for AI and hyperscale system designs, keeping high-speed flash storage close to the CPU and GPU. With the Kioxia NX1 Series, we're delivering the performance, thermal flexibility and storage density customers need to support the next generation of GPU-enabled infrastructure." Kioxia says the read-intensive NX1 has a 1 drive write per day endurance rating but did not provide any direct performance numbers. Instead it said it has 38 percent more sequential write speed and 20 percent more random write speed than, Kioxia says, the prior XD series. As the XD8 https://www.blocksandfiles.com/flash/2024/10/16/kioxia-speeds-up-rocksdb-with-flexible-data-placement-ssd/1605004 , announced in 2024, provided 12.5 GBps sequential write bandwidth and 250,000 random write IOPS we can extrapolate this to the NX1 having 8.4 GB/s sequential write speed and 300,000 random write IOPS. Oddly, considering this is a read-intensive drive, the company did not provide any read performance numbers. The XD8 delivered 12.5 GB/s sequential read bandwidth and 2.3 million random read IOPS and we might hope the NX1 improves on these numbers. The XD8 used 112-layer BiCS gen 5 NAND in TLC format, with the NX1 being made from denser 218-layer BiCS 8 NAND. We might get a read speed clue from Kioxia’s CD9P-R https://www.blocksandfiles.com/ai-ml/2025/06/20/kioxia-builds-go-faster-single-port-datacenter-ssd/1601857 read-intensive PCIe gen 5 drive, which also use BiCS 8 flash and pumps out 2.6 million random read IOPS and 14.8 GB/s sequential read bandwidth. The NX1's read performance might be in this area. The 9.5mm E1.S version of the NX1 supports both cold-plate-compatible liquid and air-cooling while the 15mm version is only an air-cooled product. The NX1 is sampling with selected hyperscale Kioxia customers, and can be seen at the FMS 2026 event, August 4 – 6 in Santa Clara, CA.