Three years after unveiling its ambitious plans, Silicon Motion has officially launched its 128TB Solid State Disk (SSD) Reference Design Kit (RDK), designed specifically to enhance performance and efficiency for artificial intelligence (AI) workloads.

Silicon Motion, recognized primarily for its innovative design of NAND flash drive controllers, has built the RDK on its MonTitan PCIe Gen 5 platform, which employs the latest generation of 2TB QLC NAND dies. This kit comes equipped with advanced firmware aimed at optimizing performance for AI tool workloads across enterprise data centers.

The MonTitan RDK boasts impressive specifications, claiming sequential read speeds surpassing 14 GB/s, categorizing it among the fastest external SSDs available today, alongside a considerable random read performance of over 3.3 million IOPS.

At the core of this kit is the PCIe Dual Ported enterprise-grade SM8366 controller, supporting PCIe Gen 5 x4 NVMe 2.0 standards and OCP 2.5 data center specifications. Notably, the kit also integrates NVMe 2.0 Flexible Data Placement (FDP), which enhances data management while maximizing SSD write efficiency and endurance.

According to Alex Chou, senior vice president of the enterprise storage and display interface solution division at Silicon Motion, the MonTitan SSD RDK serves as a comprehensive solution. It enables customers to quickly develop and deploy enterprise-class SSDs tailored for AI data center and edge server applications. Importantly, Silicon Motion specializes in creating reference design kits available in multiple form factors, allowing customers the flexibility to build customized products. The RDK is available in E1.S, E3.S, and U.2 forms, with E1.S and U.2 mirroring the M.2 form-factor, while E3.S resembles traditional 2.5-inch SATA drives but utilizes a PCIe interface.

Traditionally, hard drives have had two advantages over SSDs: they have offered greater capacity and lower costs. While an 8TB HDD is significantly cheaper than its SSD counterpart, the MonTitan RDK addresses the capacity gap, with current high-capacity HDDs maxing out at 24TB.

Though pricing details have not been disclosed, it’s known that high-capacity SSDs generally carry a hefty price tag. For context, Solidigm’s 30TB SSD retails for around $3,360, whereas two 16TB drives from Western Digital are priced under $600.

Silicon Motion now positions itself among competitors like Samsung, Western Digital, and Micron in the advanced storage market, setting the stage for enhanced capabilities in AI-driven applications.

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