Kioxia Says Its New Flash Drives Fit More Storage Into the Same Server Space
Kioxia said on Oct. 9, 2026, that it has started sending samples of its first server drive in the E1.L format, a long, narrow card shape made for slim servers, to selected customers. The company says the drives, branded the LD4 Series, come in 15.36 TB and 30.72 TB sizes and are the first it has built with the eighth generation of its BiCS flash memory in QLC form, a cell design that packs more data into the same chip.
Kioxia's stated reason for the format is space. The release says the largest data centers are turning to high-density designs to fit more storage capacity into limited server space as demand for data, including data for AI, keeps growing. It says the LD4 is made for 1U servers, the thinnest standard rack size, and for storage that is read far more often than it is written.
Nobody can buy one. Sampling means the drives have gone to a small number of customers to be tested, and Kioxia's own note in the announcement says the samples are only for checking that the drives work, and that the specifications of a mass-production version may differ. No price, no availability date and no speed figures of any kind appear in the release.
The release also says the LD4's architecture has been validated for capacities as high as 122.88 TB. That figure describes a design Kioxia says it has validated, not a drive that exists or is being sampled.
Kioxia says the series will be shown at the Open Compute Project's summit in San Jose, California, from Oct. 12 to 15, 2026. The release lists a PCIe 5.0 interface, a single-port design and support for the project's specification for data center drives.
