Kioxia BG6 Series: New SSDs for OEM customers

Kioxia has presented new client SSDs for the B2B market. The Kioxia BG6 series is a storage solution that is said to be capable of high performance thanks to BiCS Flash 3D flash memory of the now 6th generation.

For quite some time now, PCIe 4.0 has arrived in the mainstream. Meanwhile, pretty much every storage media manufacturer also offers matching SSDs. Kioxia has now presented a brand new series that relies on the blazing fast interface. The Kioxia BG6 series is based on the 6th generation BiCS Flash 3D flash memory and is supposed to experience an immense performance increase. According to the manufacturer, it is 1.7 times the previous performance increase. The goal of the BG6 series is to get the most out of PCIe 4.0 for users. The brand new SSDs will be available in M.2 2230 and M.2 2280 form factors. However, the Koxia BG6 series will not be sold directly to end customers. Instead, the manufacturer is focusing on the OEM market here.

This means that the storage expert will sell its SSDs to producers of notebooks and desktop PCs, for example. According to Koxia, the buyers of a correspondingly well-equipped device should then primarily benefit from high flash memory performance at a fair price. According to Kioxia, the secret recipe for the high performance is the Host Memory Buffer (HMB). With HMB technology, the SSD unceremoniously uses a part of the DRAM like its own memory. As a result of not using DRAM, the SSD is said to be able to deliver higher performance. KIOXIA's BG6 drives feature the engineered Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology, which uses a portion of host memory (DRAM) as if it were its own memory to provide a DRAM-free high-performance SSD.

Kioxia's BG6 series is expected to launch in four different sizes. In addition to 256 GB and 512 GB, the manufacturer also plans to offer them with a capacity of 1,024 GB and 2,048 GB. The fast PCIe 4.0 interface is supposed to enable 64 gigatransfers per second. For users, this means speeds of up to 6,000 MB/s for sequential reading and 5,300 MB/s for sequential writing. The IOPS are again 850,000 for reading and 900,000 for writing. Furthermore, the SSDs are supposed to support the NVMe 1.4c feature set.

Important commands for managing the SSD should again be able to be entered via the System Management Bus (SMBus). In particular, thermal management should be much better under control here. Kioxia also wants to ensure the security of the stored data. The SSDs of the BG6 series support standards like TCG Pyrites and Opal. On top of that, there is supposed to be peer-to-peer data protection. Furthermore, the SSDs are supposed to support notification signals in case of a power failure. This ensures that no data is lost in case of emergency shutdowns.

As a regular consumer, you won't be able to find the new Kioxia BG6 series on store shelves. Instead, the manufacturer is offering the latest generation of SSDs to OEM customers. Ultimately, we will only find them installed in notebooks and the like as end customers. The manufacturer wants to provide the corresponding flash memory samples to its customers in the second half of the year.