Independent testing of Kioxia's CM9-R 15.36TB E3.S has put Gen5 read-intensive NVMe back in front of buyers. Here are the CM9 part numbers by form factor, what the E3.S drive actually delivered, and the bay, lane and cage details that decide whether it fits your HPE Gen12 or Dell PowerEdge R770.
Enterprise NVMe is one of the busiest threads in the practitioner forums this week. A fresh independent review of the Kioxia CM9-R 15.36TB in the EDSFF E3.S form factor landed alongside a run of listings and questions around 15TB-class NVMe drives, server-pull SAS disks and firmware for older NVMe cards. The common thread is simple: buyers want more capacity per bay and Gen5 speed, but they are not sure which form factor their next servers need. This piece pulls together the CM9 ordering codes, what the E3.S drive did under test, and how E3.S and 2.5-inch U.3 differ in current HPE and Dell platforms.
What the CM9-R 15.36TB E3.S delivered under test
Kioxia rates the 15.36TB E3.S model at up to 14,800 MB/s sequential read, 11,000 MB/s sequential write, 3.4 million random 4K read IOPS and 540,000 random 4K write IOPS, with 1 drive write per day over a five-year warranty. In independent testing the drive slightly beat its own sequential ratings, at about 14.9 GB/s read and 11.3 GB/s write, and held a random 4K write mean of roughly 518,000 IOPS with a tight spread once conditioned.
- Sequential write is the step up over Kioxia's CD9P-R: the reviewers recorded similar reads but about 7.2 GB/s writes on the CD9P-R 7.68TB, against 11.3 GB/s on the CM9-R.
- Peak drive temperature in the test rig was 60.9C against a 76.9C warning threshold. The reviewers log this because another Gen5 drive throttled in an enclosure they expected to cope, so check the airflow on dense E3.S cages.
- The CM9 family is dual-port capable: PCIe 5.0 as a single x4 link or two x2 links, which is what high-availability storage controllers and dual-controller arrays use.
- The 7.68TB, 15.36TB and 30.72TB E3.S models use Kioxia's BiCS FLASH generation 8 TLC; the 1.92TB and 3.84TB models use generation 5.
CM9 part numbers by form factor and capacity
Kioxia sells the CM9 in three security variants per capacity: SIE (sanitize instant erase), SED (self-encrypting) and FIPS SED. The fifth character tells you which: X for SIE, D for SED, F for FIPS. The R or V after it is read-intensive or mixed-use, and JE or UL at the end of the stem is E3.S or 2.5-inch.
| Series / form factor | Capacity | SIE | SED | FIPS SED |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CM9-R E3.S (7.5 mm), 1 DWPD | 30.72 TB | KCM9XRJE30T7 | KCM9DRJE30T7 | KCM9FRJE30T7 |
| CM9-R E3.S (7.5 mm), 1 DWPD | 15.36 TB | KCM9XRJE15T3 | KCM9DRJE15T3 | KCM9FRJE15T3 |
| CM9-R E3.S (7.5 mm), 1 DWPD | 7.68 TB | KCM9XRJE7T68 | KCM9DRJE7T68 | KCM9FRJE7T68 |
| CM9-R E3.S (7.5 mm), 1 DWPD | 3.84 TB | KCM9XRJE3T84 | KCM9DRJE3T84 | KCM9FRJE3T84 |
| CM9-R E3.S (7.5 mm), 1 DWPD | 1.92 TB | KCM9XRJE1T92 | KCM9DRJE1T92 | KCM9FRJE1T92 |
| CM9-R 2.5-inch U.3 (15 mm), 1 DWPD | 61.44 TB | KCM9XRUL61T4 | KCM9DRUL61T4 | KCM9FRUL61T4 |
| CM9-R 2.5-inch U.3 (15 mm), 1 DWPD | 30.72 TB | KCM9XRUL30T7 | KCM9DRUL30T7 | KCM9FRUL30T7 |
| CM9-R 2.5-inch U.3 (15 mm), 1 DWPD | 15.36 TB | KCM9XRUL15T3 | KCM9DRUL15T3 | KCM9FRUL15T3 |
| CM9-R 2.5-inch U.3 (15 mm), 1 DWPD | 7.68 TB | KCM9XRUL7T68 | KCM9DRUL7T68 | KCM9FRUL7T68 |
| CM9-V 2.5-inch U.3 (15 mm), 3 DWPD | 12.8 TB | KCM9XVUL12T8 | KCM9DVUL12T8 | KCM9FVUL12T8 |
| CM9-V 2.5-inch U.3 (15 mm), 3 DWPD | 6.4 TB | KCM9XVUL6T40 | KCM9DVUL6T40 | KCM9FVUL6T40 |
- Read-intensive versus mixed-use: at the same flash, CM9-V trades capacity for endurance, so 12.8TB at 3 DWPD sits where CM9-R offers 15.36TB at 1 DWPD. Kioxia rates the CM9-V 2.5-inch at up to 800,000 random write IOPS against 540,000 for the CM9-R.
- The biggest CM9-R capacity, 61.44TB, is 2.5-inch only. The E3.S line tops out at 30.72TB, and Kioxia rates that model lower than the 15.36TB on performance (13,500 MB/s read, 9,750 MB/s write, 2.75 million random read IOPS, 270,000 random write IOPS).
- The 1.92TB E3.S is the slow end of the range at 3,600 MB/s sequential write and 170,000 random write IOPS, so do not size a performance tier on it.
E3.S or U.3: what your server actually takes
E3.S and 2.5-inch U.3 are not interchangeable. An E3.S drive uses the EDSFF edge connector and needs an E3.S bay and backplane. A U.3 drive goes into a 2.5-inch tri-mode bay. The choice is made when the server chassis and drive cages are ordered, so it is worth getting right before the drives are bought.
| Server | Maximum E3.S | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| HPE ProLiant Compute DL360 Gen12 (1U) | Up to 20 E3.S | Front cage built from 4-drive E3.S boxes, 32G NVMe x2 or x4 backplanes; can be mixed with 2SFF U.3 boxes in the 10SFF/20EDSFF hybrid chassis |
| HPE ProLiant Compute DL380 Gen12 (2U) | Up to 36 E3.S front | EDSFF CTO chassis, or 12 EDSFF plus 16SFF in a mixed front |
| Dell PowerEdge R770 (2U) | Up to 40 E3.S front plus 4 rear | Options from 8 to 40 front E3.S; 32-drive configurations come in x2 or x4 Gen5 lanes per drive, or with dual front PERC H975i hardware RAID |
Check the lanes per drive. A PCIe 5.0 lane carries roughly 3.9 GB/s after encoding, so an x2 link tops out near 7.9 GB/s and an x4 link near 15.8 GB/s. A 14.8 GB/s drive in an x2 bay is capped at about half its rated sequential read. x2 backplanes buy drive count; x4 buys per-drive bandwidth.
- Mixed estates: if most of your fleet is Gen10 Plus, Gen11 or 15G/16G with 2.5-inch NVMe or tri-mode bays, the CM9-R and CM9-V in U.3 keep one drive type across old and new servers.
- New density builds: E3.S fits more drives per U (20 in a 1U DL360 Gen12 versus 10 SFF) and is where vendors are taking Gen5 NVMe, so it suits new storage or AI data-staging nodes.
- OEM-branded drives: HPE and Dell ship their own part numbers and firmware for E3.S and U.3 NVMe. A bare Kioxia drive may work, but OEM-labelled drives are what keep iLO or iDRAC health reporting and support clean.
The ETON view
The conversation is not really about one Kioxia drive. It is about buyers trying to move to Gen5 NVMe without committing to the wrong bay type. Our advice is to decide the form factor at the chassis level first. If you are adding capacity to an existing Gen10 Plus, Gen11 or 16G fleet, stay on 2.5-inch U.3 and keep spares common across the estate. If you are building new Gen12 or R770 storage-dense nodes, E3.S makes sense, but specify x4 backplanes wherever per-drive bandwidth matters and leave headroom on fans and inlet temperature.
On price and availability, enterprise NAND has been tight all year, and 15TB-class Gen5 drives are where buyers feel it most. Read-intensive 1 DWPD parts like the CM9-R give the best cost per terabyte for analytics, inference data and virtualisation, while CM9-V at 3 DWPD is the safer choice for databases and write-heavy logging. We can quote both bare Kioxia and HPE or Dell branded equivalents, and because we are vendor neutral we will tell you when the OEM-labelled version is worth the premium for support and when it is not.
Lead times vary by capacity and by OEM label, so ask us before you lock a build date. When the fleet moves on, we buy back used enterprise NVMe and SAS drives with certified data erasure, which takes some of the sting out of moving up to Gen5.
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Category: Storage · Vendor: Kioxia, HPE, Dell · Technology: PCIe 5.0 NVMe, EDSFF E3.S, U.3 · Last verified: 06 Oct 2026 · ~6 min read
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