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128TB capacity, 14GBps sustained speed and 3,000K IOPS: Silicon Motion’s new enterprise SSD should get Samsung, Sandisk worried

March 24, 2025

Silicon Motion 128TB SSD RDK optimizes AI pipelines with enhanced data management
PerformaShape technology boosts SSD efficiency for AI-driven workloads
MonTitan SSD’s PCIe Gen 5 speeds enhance enterprise data throughput

Silicon Motion, a leading NAND flash controller designer, has begun supplying its 128TB SSD Reference Design Kit (RDK), to select partners after nearly three years of testing since its initial announcement in 2022.

This large SSD kit, utilizes the latest 2 TB die QLC NAND, is built on the MonTitan PCIe Gen 5 platform, and features advanced firmware to maximize performance and efficiency in AI tool workloads, making it one of the best external SSD designs available.

The MonTitan RDK, designed for enterprise and data center use, delivers sequential read speeds exceeding 14 GB/s, ranking among the fastest external SSDs, with random read performance of over 3.3 million IOPS for efficient data thoroughput. The kit utilizes the PCIe Dual Ported enterprise-grade SM8366 controller with support for PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe 2.0 and OCP 2.5 data center specifications.

High-speed storage that could shake up the enterprise market

The RDK’s high-speed performance provides a 25% improvement in random read efficiency over other Gen 5 solutions, making it particularly well-suited for AI applications such as large language model (LLM) training and graph neural network (GNN) computations.

Additionally, the drive design utilizes NVMe 2.0 FDP (Flexible Data Placement) to enhance write efficiency and endurance, extending the lifespan of the QLC NAND.

“Silicon Motion’s MonTitan SSD RDK offers a comprehensive solution for our customers, enabling them to rapidly develop and deploy enterprise-class SSDs tailored for AI data center and edge server applications.” said Alex Chou, Senior VP of Enterprise Storage and Display Interface Solution Business.

“By providing this fully integrated platform that supports up to 128 TB SSD with QLC NAND, we empower our customers and solution partners to accelerate the development and commercialization of AI solution’s growing demands of high-capacity, high-performance storage.”

Silicon Motion’s proprietary PerformaShape technology optimizes SSD performance based on user-defined quality-of-service (QoS) parameters, reducing latency. The new RDK could play a crucial role in AI storage and data center infrastructure, optimizing multi-tenant environments by efficiently handling AI data pipeline stages such as ingestion, preparation, training, and inference.

“We are delighted to collaborate with Silicon Motion in developing our latest enterprise SSD for AI servers and data centers. With Silicon Motion’s MonTitan Enterprise SSD development platform, we have the flexibility to design enterprise SSDs that deliver industry-leading performance,” said CC Wu, VP of Innodisk.

Frank Chen, the CEO of Exascend said, “In the era of AI explosion, data storage is more critical than ever. Through this collaboration with Silicon Motion, we have developed a PCIe Gen 5 SSD tailored for AI servers, ensuring stable read and write speeds with efficient data management, perfectly meeting the storage demands of the AI era.”

Via TechPowerUp

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