Nvidia and Kioxia have been working on a new SSD design that will keep Nvidia's AI GPUs fed with no downtime during intensive AI workloads. Kioxia has announced the new E3.S CM9 series, which Kioxia classifies as a "Super High IOPS" SSD that offers 25.6TB of capacity and can write to itself three times per day for the entirety of its warranty period. The new drive will be available for customers to evaluate by the end of 2026.
The new drive is part of Kioxia and Nvidia's move to bring incredibly fast storage to AI GPUs. The CM9 series comes with Kioxia's XL-flash, which is designed to achieve over 10 million IOPS, a figure that is around three to four times greater than traditional datacenter SSDs. XL-Flash is made using SLC NAND flash (the fastest flash type available) that boasts a read latency range of just 3 to 5 microseconds. By comparison, traditional SSDs normally have a peak at 3 to 4 million IOPS and have read latencies in the 40 to 100-microsecond range.
