Kioxia Corporation has announced its first E1.L form factor solid-state drive built with its BiCS FLASH generation 8 QLC flash memory, targeting high-density storage deployments in hyperscale data centres.
The company said demand for data storage, including for AI workloads, is driving hyperscalers to pursue higher-density designs that increase capacity within limited server space. Kioxia said its LD4 Series is designed for high-density 1U server environments and read-intensive storage applications.
According to Kioxia, LD4 Series drives are sampling to select customers and will be showcased at the 2026 OCP Global Summit in San Jose, California, from October 12 to 15.
Kioxia listed features for the LD4 Series including NVMe 2.0e compliance and support for the Open Compute Project (OCP) Datacenter NVMe SSD Specification v2.6. The company said the drives use a single-port design for hyperscale and data centre-class servers.
Kioxia said the LD4 Series will be available in 15.36TB and 30.72TB capacities, with what it described as a validated architecture enabling capacities up to 122.88TB.
The company noted that sample units are for functional checks only and specifications may differ in mass production. It also said read and write performance may vary depending on host devices, software and operating conditions.
