Kioxia Corporation has unveiled the KIOXIA NX1 Series, a new family of E1.S PCIe® 5.0 NVMe™ enterprise solid-state drives (SSDs) designed specifically for AI-driven servers and hyperscale data center operations. Marking Kioxia’s first storage line to feature native direct liquid cooling support, the NX1 Series provides high-throughput, energy-conscious storage for accelerator-heavy enterprise environments.
As artificial intelligence models expand and compute density increases, legacy storage systems face severe thermal and bandwidth bottlenecks. Built as the direct successor to the KIOXIA XD Series, the NX1 Series leverages a next-generation, proprietary controller architecture developed in-house to satisfy the demanding requirements of modern GPU-equipped clusters.
Compared to its predecessor, the KIOXIA XD8 Series, the NX1 Series delivers significant hardware improvements, including up to a 38% increase in sequential write speed and up to a 20% bump in random write performance.
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Built for Advanced Thermal Density and Liquid Cooling
Thermal management remains one of the primary hurdles in next-generation data center design. The KIOXIA NX1 Series addresses these challenges by offering form factors engineered for both air-cooled and liquid-cooled server racks.
The SSDs are available in two distinct configurations:
- E1.S 9.5 mm: Engineered to support both air-cooling and cold-plate direct liquid cooling implementations.
- E1.S 15 mm: Tailored for standard high-airflow, air-cooled server enclosures.
By accommodating cold-plate liquid cooling, the 9.5 mm drives allow cloud service providers (CSPs) and hyperscalers to dissipate heat more effectively in ultra-dense GPU nodes without sacrificing rack space or storage capacity.
Technical Specifications & Architecture
The NX1 Series combines Kioxia’s proprietary flash technology with modern open-data center standards:
- NAND Flash Technology: Manufactured using the 8th generation BiCS FLASH™ TLC 3D NAND flash memory technology from Kioxia with CMOS Directly Bonded to Array (CBA) architecture.
- Storage Capacity: Capable of providing storage capacity choices from 1.92 Terabytes (TB) to 15.36 TB.
- Workload Endurance: Designed to support 1 DWPD workloads for read-intensive and mixed workloads in data centers.
- Industry Standards: Fully compatible with PCIe® 5.0, NVMe™ 2.0, and OCP Datacenter NVMe™ SSD 2.6 standards.
- Flexible Data Placement (FDP): Supporting NVMe FDP to reduce write amplification and extend drive life in multitenant environments.
- Enterprise Encryption Options: Available with TCG Opal compliant self-encrypting drives (SED) technology.
