BiCS5

Kioxia this morning is rolling out its next-generation of full-size client SSDs, the XG8 family. Like its predecessors, the XG8 is aimed at the OEM market, for customers who are after a full M.2 2280-sized drive and are looking for better performance than the company’s more integrated and compact BG-series drives. Notable features for the latest-generation drive include a PCIe 4.0-capable controller, as well as capacities as high as 4TB. And while we’d normally use the company’s previous-generation drive as a baseline to illustrate what’s new with the latest drive, today’s announcement of the XG8 is a bit weird, even by Kioxia’s own OEM-centric standards. The predecessor to the XG8 is the XG7, which was launched in November of 2020 with a very similar feature...