Kioxia LC9 SSD Hits 245.76TB of Capacity in a Single Drive

Kioxia LC9 Series Cover

Kioxia is almost just making fun of hard drives at this point. While we covered how Seagate is shipping 30TB HAMR IronWolf Pro and Exos M hard drives last week, Kioxia has something that makes that look like ancient technology. At a whopping 245.76TB in a 2.5″ drive (versus 30TB in 3.5″ drives), the density of the new Kioxia LC9 is awesome.

Kioxia LC9 SSD Hits 245.76TB of Capacity in a Single Drive

The huge 245.76TB capacity Kioxia LC9 is available in either the 2.5″ or the E3.L form factors. The E3.S only scales to the 122.88TB capacity at this point. Given the random write IOPS, this is probably not a PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD you would want for heavy random write workloads. On the other hand, these higher capacity drives tend to focus on more sequential read/ write patterns.

Koixia LC9 245.76TB Specs Large

The giant capacity is made using 2Tb QLC NAND dies and the Kioxia BiCS FLASH generation 8 NAND. Those 2Tb dies are stacked 32 high to yield 8TB per package. The move from E3.S to E3.L is most likely to fit enough of these packages. It is odd, but one of the advantages of the 2.5″ form factor is the ability to use multiple PCBs in a 15mm drive to get more density.

Koixia LC9 245.76TB BiCS Large

That density is really crazy. It would take around eight 3.5″ 30TB drives to have a similar capacity to a 245.76TB LC9 SSD that is only 2.5″. Or in a modern 10-bay 2.5″ chassis, that is almost 2.5PB per U and in a 2U 24-bay system that is almost 6PB or almost 3PB per 1U.

Final Words

These new huge 245.76TB Kioxia LC9 NVMe SSDs offer a lot of capacity and performance for a relatively compact form factor. We have been hinting that while the 122.88TB / 128TB drive class was a big hit at FMS 2024, doubling that capacity would happen quickly. We are already at 244.76TB / 256TB class NVMe SSDs. The other side to this is that due to NAND scaling, SSDs are doubling in capacity every year or two. These large capacity SSDs are really meant to displace hard drives in capacity tiers, and hard drive technologies have been scaling at a drastically slower rate. We are effectively in the four drives per PB now.