Nvidia's GTC conference has focused heavily — almost exclusively — on AI this year. Everything shown seems to have an AI connection. And one thing we know about AI is that it needs a lot of memory, and a lot of storage to hold the increasingly large models. That's where Kioxia's new LC9 data center drive comes into play.
The LC9 uses Kioxia's BiCS 8 QLC NAND with 2 Tb dies. It's unclear how many dies are in a package, probably 16, yielding 4TB capacity packages. Even with that much density, you would still need 32 such packages to reach the 122.88 TB of capacity offered by the top LC9 model (leaving a decent amount of spare flash to help with performance and endurance).
What's new with the LC9 is that it's also a PCIe 5.0 compliant drive, and it's dual-port as well. That means it can function as a single x4 device, or it can alternatively run with two x2 links. Kioxia showed the drive running a sustained read test and pushing close to the interface's maximum 15 GB/s (give or take).
The drive isn't rated for massive amounts of data writes, with only a 0.3 DWPD (drive writes per day) endurance. That's still plenty, as it means with a 5 year warranty the drive can handle around 67,000 TBW, which is more than enough for read-intensive applications. In contrast, some data center drives are designed to accommodate multiple DWPD, especially those intended for write-heavy workloads, so the write endurance rating tells us the target usage for this drive.
The LC9 instead focuses on providing high read speeds for a lot of data. That's useful for AI models that continue to grow in size. With its voracious appetite for both memory and storage — and a lot of companies were talking about ways to offload portions of the AI stack to fast SSD storage — it feels like it's only a matter of time before someone creates a single LLM that will require the entire capacity of Kioxia's LC9 122.88 TB drive.
