- Kioxia has added a 245.76TB SSD to its LC9 series
- It is the biggest SSD ever launched, and is already being sampled to clients
- Solidigm, Phison, Dapustor, Samsung and Sandisk are the other big contenders in this category
Japanese SSD vendor Kioxia has unveiled a 245.76TB NVMe SSD, the LC9, which is squarely aimed at enterprise clients looking for the highest capacity available.
Capable of holding more than 52,000 DVD movies, it is the largest SSD ever launched, at twice the capacity of the next biggest SSD, the Solidigm D5-P5336.
The LC9 is available in legacy 2.5-inch as well as E3.L form factor. A smaller 122.88TB SSD can be ordered in a more compact E3.S form factor. Kioxia didn’t provide more details other than it is a PCIe 5.0 product offering a wide range of security options (SIE, SED, FIPS SED etc) and support for OCP specs.
Supersized SSD are essential for AI
We don’t know what the warranty or endurance (measured in drives written per day) are but we do know that the storage device uses a proprietary NAND solution, a 32-die stack of 2 Tb BICS FLASH QLC 3D flash memory; that’s one chip containing 8TB of storage.
Kioaix has confirmed the LC9 will make a formal debut at the Future of Memory and Storage 2025 conference, and some customers will have samples soon.
Generative AI has put GPUs and compute squarely in the limelight but storage (or system memory) is rarely mentioned and yet pivotal to any AI success story.
As Kioxia puts it, GAI “places unique demands on storage, including the need to store vast datasets for training large language models (LLMs), and to create embeddings and vector databases that support inference through retrieval augmented generation (RAG)”.
And we can thank AI for being the catalyst in the current storage race. For the best part of a decade, Exadrive’s 100TB 2.5-inch SSD was the storage champion but since then Solidigm, Phison, Dapustor and Samsung, have showcased or launched 122.88TB SSDs.
Sandisk, Kioxia’s partner also confirmed it will launch a 256TB SSD in 2026 and a 512TB SSD in 2027. It is worth highlighting all these drives are geared towards hyperscalers and the enterprise market and will compete against hard drives like Seagate’s 36TB Exos M.
Consumers will have to contend with 8TB SSDs, currently the largest capacity for mainstream buyers, a glass ceiling that hasn’t been shattered for the past five years and unlikely to change for the foreseeable future.
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