THE CRUNCH
Kioxia has introduced the LD4 Series, its first SSD in the E1.L form factor (a long, narrow drive shape built for dense servers) to use its BiCS FLASH generation 8 QLC memory. QLC stores four bits per cell, trading some endurance for higher capacity, which suits read-heavy storage. The drives are aimed at hyperscale data centres and scale-out environments, with capacities of 15.36 TB and 30.72 TB available now and a validated architecture enabling up to 122.88 TB.
The drives comply with the NVMe 2.0e specification over PCIe 5.0, support the OCP Datacenter NVMe SSD Specification 2.6, and use a single-port design for hyperscale servers. Kioxia says the LD4 Series is intended for read-intensive applications, where high capacity and read performance serve large-scale data storage, with company executive Neville Ichhaporia pointing to AI workloads as a driver of demand.
Sampling is under way with select customers, and the drives will be shown at the OCP Global Summit in San Jose from 12 to 15 October 2026.