Kioxia has announced the CM9 DLC, an enterprise solid state drive equipped for direct liquid cooling systems. Built on the EDSFF E3.S form factor, the hardware links storage and compute components into a single cold plate loop. Sequential read speeds reach 14.8 GB/s on PCIe 5.0 systems, with storage options scaling up to 32TB.
Direct liquid cooling compatibility allows operators to cool entire server racks with liquid rather than traditional air cooling. By mounting cold plates directly over storage hardware, data centers eliminate thermal barriers between processors and flash memory. This single thermal loop targets dense computing clusters running high speed AI context cache workloads.
The drive complies with PCIe 5.0, NVMe 2.0, and NVMe MI 1.2c protocols, alongside the OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD v2.5 standard. Kioxia includes dual port capability for enterprise link redundancy. Buyers can select between 2 endurance tiers: a 1 DWPD configuration for read intensive tasks and a 3 DWPD model for mixed workload computing.
Data throughput peaks at 14.8 GB/s for sequential reads and 11 GB/s for sequential writes. Random 4KiB performance reaches 3400K IOPS for read commands and 800K IOPS for write operations. Maximum capacity scales to 32TB, giving cloud operators the storage density required to deliver continuous data streams to processing clusters.
