Kioxia announces second and faster slablet SSD in three days

Not content with announcing its EG7 PCIe gen4 QLC gumstick format SSD two days ago, Kioxia has launched a PCIe gen 5 gumstick drive today; the BG8.

It’s a fast drive, as you would expect with a PCIe gen 5 interface.The BG8’s random read/write performance is 1.4 million/1.3 million IOPS, with sequential reads up to 10.3 GBps and sequential writes maxing out at 10 GBps.

Kioxia America’s Maulik Sompura, director of product management in the SSD business unit, said: “The KIOXIA BG8 Series delivers substantial performance improvements across both sequential and random workloads, giving OEMs the ability to design systems that are faster, more responsive, and better aligned with evolving user expectations.” 

They would as the PCIe gen5 bus has twice the speed of PCIe gen4.

Kioxia’s previous PCIe gen4 BG7 drive, announced in January and using the same BiCS 8, TLC, NAND but with a PCIe gen4 interface, provides up to 1 million random read and write IOPS, sequentially writing up to 7 GBps and reading at up to 6 GBps. Kioxia says that, compared to the previous generation, meaning, we assume, the BG7, the BG8 Series achieves up to 47 percent higher sequential read, 67 percent higher sequential write, 44 percent higher random read, and 30 percent higher random write performance. 

We view the BG8 as pretty much as a PCIe 5 version of the BG7. Like the EG7 it has no onboard DRAM, relying on a host memory buffer. It also has the same SED (Self-Encrypting Drive) feature with TCP Opal v2.02.

The BG8 is aimed at the slim laptop and desktop PC market and has capacities of 512 GB, 1 and 2TB, the same as the EG7.

Kioxia has the mainstream TLC BG7 and value-focussed LC EG7 drives for the PCIe gen4 client PC market, and now the TLC BG8 in the PCIe gen 5 client PC market, suggesting to us that a potential QLC EG8 might be coming as well to the PCIe gen5 market.

We note that all these SSDs use the classic M.2 format and not the newer EDSFF E1.S (short) or E1.L (long) gumstick formats, suggesting a slow adoption rate for E1.S and E1.L.

Kioxia says the 1TB BG8 has a 1,200 TBW (Terabytes Written) endurance, implying that the 512 GB version  is rated at 600 TBW and the 2 TB version at 2,400 TBW. The prior BG7 has a 2 million hour MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) rating. We would expect the BG8’s MTBF to be pretty similar.