Kioxia releases record-breaking 246TB SSD

Kioxia has announced the LC9 solid-state drive with a capacity of 245.76 TB – today it is the largest SSD in the world. According to the developers, this volume is enough to store up to 12.5 thousand files of 20 GB each – for example, 4K movies.

The drive is aimed at use in data centers, primarily for storing and processing data related to artificial intelligence models and scalable loads (hyperscale). In one NAND chip, 8 TB of memory was placed – this is a record density at the moment. In total, the E3.L format case holds 32 such chips, as well as a controller of its own design (its name is not disclosed).

Kioxia LC9 is built on BiCS8 2Tb 3D QLC NAND chips. The sequential read speed reaches 12 GB/s, the write speed is up to 3 GB/s. The random operation performance is up to 1.3 million IOPS for reading and up to 50 thousand IOPS for writing.

The write resource is 0.3 full overwrites per day (approximately 74 TB per day). For corporate systems, this is relatively small, but considering the total volume, the figure is acceptable.

Among the built-in security features are kernel-level recovery, error correction, power failure protection, AES-256 hardware encryption, CNSA 2.0 firmware digital signature, and support for post-quantum cryptographic algorithms.

The drive will be available in several form factors:

• 2.5-inch U.2 – up to 122.88 TB,
• E3.S – up to 122.88 TB,
• E3.L – up to 245.76 TB.

The LC9 series is being tested by the company’s partners. A public presentation is expected in August 2025 at the Future of Memory and Storage conference. Pricing has not yet been announced and will likely be available only to corporate customers.