Recently Western Digital announced the start of testing its SSD with a capacity of 64 TB for data centers , and today at the FMS 2024 exhibition, the company presented a solid-state drive of the next generation with a volume of 128 TB. The SSD uses Kioxia's BiCS8 QLC NAND memory and is primarily designed for "fast AI data and high-performance applications".
Demo SSD > received firmware optimized for AI checkpoints – workload that includes sequential writes but also requires that the disk maintain a minimum service level for concurrent read operations. Judging by the photo from the exhibition, the speed of sequential writing for such a workload reaches 6.32 GB/s, and the speed of simultaneous sequential reading — 3.13 GB/s. Western Digital has not yet announced other characteristics of the new product, but judging by the exhibition sample, the drive will be produced in U.2 and U.3 form factors.
218-layer memory’BiCS8 uses a CMOS hybrid circuit, directly connected to the array (CMOS directly bonded to Array, CBA). This technology is the evolutionary successor of Micron's CMOS-under-Array (CuA) and SK hynix's Periphery-under-Cell (4D PUC) technologies. BiCS8 NAND can interact with the controller at speeds up to 3600 MT/s, making it suitable for use in Gen 4+ drives.
Western Digital — is not the only company that has developed a high-performance SSD with a capacity of 128 TB. Samsung recently announced that it has the technology to create solid-state drives with a volume of 120 TB. Solidigm demonstrated at FMS 2024 a prototype SSD QLC with a capacity of 122 Tbytes.
AI workloads have become a new challenge for enterprise SSD suppliers and an incentive to produce energy-efficient high-speed and high-capacity solid-state drives with maximum density of placement in data centers.