Kioxia is announcing a new lineup FL6 series of SSDs featuring Kioxia’s new high-speed Storage Class Memory (SCM). This new memory system is based on Kioxi’s BiCS 3D flash technology with 1 bit per cell SLC XL-Flash, which Kioxia believes will provide cheaper and faster SSDs than Intel’s Optane with 3D XPoint can provide.
The new FL6 SSDs are the first storage devices to use Kioxia’s new XL-Flash and BiCS flash technology. The company has been working on this tech for nearly two years to make SSDs that offer the performance of more exotic memories, like Intel’s Optane, but at a drastically cheaper price point. Unfortunately, Kioxia hasn’t shared detailed performance specs, but here’s what we know from a prior announcement:
Kioxia’s new SCM SSDs are targeted towards enterprise and datacenter uses, with the goal of having more performance and lower latency than regular TLC-based flash storage. This is so FL6 series SSDs can essentially operate as Optane equivalents in some cases, thus filling the gap between DRAM and regular SSDs.
