Kioxia unveils E1.L SSDs for hyperscalers with up to 122.88TB capacity

What happened

On Friday, 9 October 2026, Kioxia introduced its LD4-series SSDs in an E1.L form factor (318.75 mm length × 38.4 mm height × 9.5 mm thick) designed for high-density storage deployments in hyperscale data centers, with capacities up to 122.88TB. The new drives use proven BiCS8 3D QLC NAND and target read-intensive workloads such as AI data repositories and object storage. They rely on Kioxia's proprietary platform complying with the NVMe 2.0e specification, feature a single-port configuration, and meet select requirements of the OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD specification 2.6; although listed as PCIe 5.0 compliant, the drives operate at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds of up to 16 GT/s per lane, providing a theoretical maximum bandwidth of approximately 7.88 GB/s in each direction. Kioxia is currently sampling 15.36 TB and 30.72 TB LD4 drives to select customers and has validated an architecture capable of supporting 122.88 TB drives, but it has not disclosed when such drives will become available or when the series will enter mass production. The company also did not disclose sequential read/write speeds, random read/write IOPS, latency, DWPD/TBW endurance ratings, or power consumption. The drives will be demonstrated at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose in mid-October.

Impact and signal

Affected components and suppliers

Source and time

Source: Tom's Hardware · 10/9/2026 · View original source