Solidigm has designed a liquid-cooled PS1010 SSD variant in E1.S format, enabling it to better support dense AI workloads that would otherwise overheat it.
As promised back in March, the D7-PS1010 has been made compatible with liquid cooling by adding an E1.S variant, longer and narrower than its original U.2 and E3.S form factors. Solidigm says this form factor allows “single-sided direct-to-chip liquid cooling technology.”
This “single-sided” terminology is confusing, implying that the cold plate has a single surface touching one side of the drive. But Solidigm’s Greg Matson, SVP and Head of Products and Marketing, stated: “This is the world’s first single-sided cold-plate solution that cools both sides of the SSD, delivering the most efficient storage subsystem available to alleviate the strain placed on SSDs in dense AI environments.”
In a YouTube video, we can watch Solidigm’s Director of Leadership Narrative and Evangelist, Scott Shadley, explaining this to a Tech Field Day audience: “We were given a footprint of 8 x 15 mm E1.S, which is what is in the brains of the direct-attached storage of the Nvidia reference design, and they said, ‘Find a way to take the fans out of it.’ The traditional way we do this is to fit eight of these guys with a fan with air fins on it.”
The resulting liquid-cooled SSD module has “liquid in and out ports for each of the drives… We have a single cold-plate touching the side of the drive… We designed the frame, the actual enclosure of the drive, to allow a single-sided cold-plate attachment” that’s spring-loaded. “The cold plate is only touching one side of the drive, but active conductive cooling by way of the material and the way the frame was designed allows us to cool the top side of the product.” So it us not literally cooling both sides of the SSD. It touches and cools one side, and internal heat conduction means the whole of the SSD, including its other side, gets cooled as well.
The company says its PS1010 E1.S SSD “is one of the fastest PCIe 5.0 SSDs on the planet for Direct-Attached Storage (DAS) AI workloads,” meaning it can be fitted in liquid-cooled AI servers. It is also hot-swappable because the cold-plate is spring loaded.
It claims the PS1010 E1.S 15 mm air-cooled SSD drops energy usage by up to 33 percent when compared to similar products, such as Micron’s 9550.
Solidigm E1.S PS1010 9.5 mm and 15 mm form factors are available in 3.84 TB and 7.68 TB capacities. The company says it’s working closely with server ODMs and OEMs, such as Supermicro, to qualify the PS1010 9.5 mm and 15 mm E1.S SSDs on recommended vendor lists, in addition to other AI and server systems.