Kioxia CM10 Series Launched for the PCIe Gen6 Generation of SSDs

ServeTheHome — ahead of FMS 2026, Kioxia launched its new CM10 series, marking the company’s entry into PCIe 6.0 enterprise storage with direct liquid cooling capability for AI infrastructure deployments. These new SSDs leverage Kioxia’s BiCS FLASH generation 10 memory technology and target high-performance KV cache workloads alongside NVIDIA CMX context memory solutions.

This new CM10 series delivers substantial performance gains over the previous CM9 generation, with Kioxia claiming up to approximately 92 percent higher sequential read performance and up to approximately 85 percent higher random read performance. These improvements address the scaling demands of AI models approaching trillions of parameters and context windows expanding to millions of tokens. KIOXIA offers the CM10 series across multiple form factors to accommodate different deployment requirements. Its E3.S and E1.S variants support direct-cold-plate liquid cooling for specific thickness profiles, while all forms remain compatible with traditional air-cooled environments. The EDSFF lineup includes E3.S at 7.5 mm thickness and E1.S in both 9.5 mm and 15 mm profiles. 9.5 mm variants of both form factors support direct liquid cooling environments. There is also a dual-port design in E3.S for high availability for traditional HA storage arrays. A 2.5″ option extends the CM10 Series to conventional enterprise chassis that cannot accommodate EDSFF forms or require higher capacity per drive slot. The 2.5″ CM6 is 15mm in thickness and maintains a dual-port design like the E3.S variant for high availability applications. Something interesting from the slides is that the 2.5″ is listed as using BiCS FLASH generation 8 TLC flash memory with PCIe 5.0 compliance, rather than the Gen 10 memory and PCIe 6.0 interface found in EDSFF models. On STH, we have been warning that the traditional U.2/ U.3 drives were likely to start giving way to EDSFF connectors as the electrical requirements of PCIe Gen6 hit. This is a great example of that. We expect to see the Kioxia CM10 series drives in AI storage tier deployments where ephemeral KV cache benefits from flash latency between GPU HBM and networked storage. Still, the new announcement is important since we are seeing chips like the NVIDIA Vera CPU and the AMD EPYC Venice series hit the market. The new CM10 series represents Kioxia’s response to AI infrastructure storage demands that extend beyond traditional enterprise SSD requirements.