Micron 176-Layer Data Center SSD, HPE Kioxia SSDs And PCIe 7 Announced

Today we talk about Micron’s new 176-layer 3D NAND SATA data center SSD. We also cover Kioxia SSDs on display at the 2022 HPE Discover as well as the PCIe SIG’s announcement of PCIe 7, specification expected to be released in 2025.

Micron announced that it is delivering a 176-layer NAND SATA SSD for data centers. The Micron 5400 SATA SSD is built on the company’s 11^th generation SATA architecture. The Micron 5400 SSDs are shown below.

According to Micron, “Users of the Micron 5400 SSD can benefit from reduced downtime, more usable life per drive, and fewer failures than other leading SATA SSDs, thanks to its performance, reliability and endurance advantages. Its industry-leading reliability is 50% better than competing SSDs.

The 5400 SSD also boasts 50% more data sheet endurance than other leading SATA SSDs in the market. That extra endurance allows customers to extend the life of their servers, improving the return on investment and decreasing the total cost of ownership of their SATA SSD-based platforms. The 5400 SSD delivers best-in-class mixed-use write performance to enable customers to get the most out of the extra endurance.”

At the HPE Discover 2022 conference Kioxia was showing it lineup of flash-based SSDs for HPE products. These products included serial attached SCSI (SAS) SSDs, PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSDs and new form factors. More information on these products are given below.

· CD7 Series EDSFF E3.S Data Center NVMe SSDs running MongoDB on HPE ProLiant servers – in one of the first public demonstrations of an E3.S drive. EDSFF E3 specifications were developed to optimize SSD designs for capacity, power, performance, and thermal/cooling – and to replace legacy 2.5” form factor SSDs.

· PM6 Series 24G SAS and RM6 Series Value SAS SSDs running VMware vSAN workloads on HPE ProLiant DL380 servers. KIOXIA RM6 drives deliver high performance and reliability at a price point targeting SATA SSDs.

· CM6 Series Enterprise NVMe SSDs (with FIPS 140-3 security module validation) running with encryption on an HPE Alletra array.

The PCI-SIG announced that the PCIe 7.0 specification will be released in 2025. It will deliver 128 GT/s raw bit rate and up to 512 GB/s bi-directionally via an x16 configuration. The new spec utilizes PAM4 (Pulse Amplitude Modulation) with 4-level signaling and will maintain backwards compatibility with all previous generations of PCIe technology. PCIe is the physical interconnect used by NVMe and CXL for storage and memory applications. The image below shows the historical growth of PCIe and future projections.

Micron released a 176-layer 3D flash SATA SSD for data centers. Kioxia was showing its enterprise SSDs at the 2022 HPE Discover. The PCIe SIG announce that the PCIe 7 specification would be released in 2025 with 128GT/s raw bit rate.