These new liquid-cooled SSDs could be the future of data center computing

Liquid cooling is typically used to offset heat caused by powerful processors and graphics cards. However, Kioxia, a Japanese company specializing in flash memory and storage, is determined to change that. It recently announced a new liquid-cooled drive called NX1, designed specifically for use in AI data centers and hyperscale environments.

Kioxia’s NX1 drives support PCIe 5.0 and NVMe 2.0, enabling high-speed, high-bandwidth storage. They fit into server-specific E1.S slots on a server’s motherboard and come in two form factors, 9.5 millimeters and 15 millimeters. Only the 9.5-millimeter drives support liquid cooling, while the 15-millimeter variant only supports air cooling. Kioxia claims that these SSDs offer 38% better sequential write performance than the previous generation, which already offered an impressive throughput of 5.8 GB/s.

Capacity ranges from 1.92TB to 15.36TB and the drives are rated at 1 DWPD (Drive Writes Per Day), meaning users should be able to write the entire drive capacity daily without any issues, at least for the entire warranty period. Currently, NX1 drives are only available to select Kioxia hyperscale customers and no pricing information is available.

SSDs have no moving parts, but they use electrical charges to read and write data. This means that every action generates heat. At home, this isn’t a big deal, but in a data center where tens of thousands of disks process billions of transactions per second, temperature regulation quickly becomes an issue. To make matters worse, when drives get too hot, they trigger thermal throttling, meaning they limit performance to protect themselves from damage. In other words, poor cooling has a tangible impact on data throughput. Excessive heat can also shorten the life of a drive.

NX1 drives are compatible with direct liquid cooling, which passes coolant over a metal plate attached to the drive. The water collects heat by convection, then is quickly moved to a radiator to cool away from the drive. Many data centers already use this approach to keep their hardware at acceptable temperatures. This means they should be relatively easy to integrate into existing cooling systems, thereby reducing costs.

These systems consume water as part of the cooling process, but the amount depends on the specific configuration. Yet with data centers already under scrutiny for driving up energy prices and affecting water supplies, doubling down may require more than just installation. Supporters have argued that data centers use about as much water as a restaurant, but that is unlikely to satisfy residents who rely on dwindling local electricity reservoirs.

Although it dissipates heat better than air, liquid cooling also has disadvantages. Migrating to these systems can be costly, and if the water loop leaks, other components could be damaged. That said, businesses typically factor expenses associated with expected outages into their operating costs.