- E2 SSDS aims to balance storage benefit capacity and efficiency
- New form factor fits rising demand for hot level data storage
- Flash with high density could reduce the addiction of the long -term hard drives
As the workloads change and cold data is heated under AI and analysis requirements, the traditional division between high-speed SSDs and cost-effective hard drives no longer serves any use case.
A new SSD form factor known as E2 is developed to tackle the growing hole in Enterprise -Data Data. Potential delivery of up to 1PB of QLC flash per Drive, they could become the medium -sized opportunity the industry needs.
Storageerview The claims that the E2 form factor is designed with support from key players, including microns, meta and clean storage through the Storage Networking Industry Association and Open Compute Project.
Fixed speeds but not pioneering
E2 SSDS is targeted at “hot” data – information that often has access to burden hard drives but does not justify the cost of performance -flash.
Physical measures E2 SSDS 200 mm x 76 mm x 9.5 mm. They use the same EDSFF connector found in E1 and E3 drives, but are optimized for high capacity, close implementations.
A standard 2U server could host up to 40 E2 drives, translated into 40 PB flash in a single chassis. Storageerview says these drives will connect over PCIE 6.0 using four lanes and can consume up to 80W per day. Device, although most are expected to pull far less.
Performance reaches 8-10MB/s per Terabyte or up to 10,000 MB/s to a 1PB model. It’s faster than hard drives, but not in the same class as top-end company’s SSDs. Instead, E2’s priorities will be capacity, efficiency and cost control.
Clean storage showed a 300 TB E2 prototype in May 2025 with drama caches, capacitors for protecting power loss and a flash controller suitable for this scale. While current servers are not yet ready for this form factor, new systems are expected to follow.
It is fair to say that E2 does not replace hard drives overnight, but it signalizes a shift. As Spec is moving towards completion this summer, suppliers are already reconsidering how large scale flash can fit into modern infrastructure.
