Liquid-Cooled Servers Focus on Cold-Plate Solid-State Drives
Solidigm, a leading manufacturer of storage solutions, has unveiled a new Solidigm D7-PS1010 SSD that incorporates a cold plate for heat conduction to liquid-cooling systems. This innovative SSD is designed to deliver exceptional performance for artificial intelligence (AI) applications in cloud-computing needs.
Key Features of the Solidigm D7-PS1010 SSD
The Solidigm D7-PS1010 SSD boasts a x4 PCI Express (PCIe) Gen 5 interface, enabling it to achieve a sequential read bandwidth of 14,500 MB/s and a write bandwidth of 4,100 MB/s. It is available in a 15-mm U.2 form factor and is populated with 176-layer, TLC 3D NAND. The SSD maintains a read latency of 60 μs and write latency of 7 to 8 μs.
The Solidigm D7-PS1010 SSD also offers impressive endurance, with the 15.36-TB variant promising a maximum lifetime program/erase cycles of up to 28 petabytes written (PBW) over a five-year period. SE models of the SSD can deliver 1.0 drive writes per day (DWPD).
The Advantage of Cold-Plate SSDs in Liquid-Cooled Environments
The use of a cold plate in the Solidigm E1.S D7-PS1010 SSD allows for hotter SSDs that run faster and have a higher capacity than air-cooled solutions. In a cold-plate system, heat is moved from the device through the plates to the liquid coolant, where the heat is then transferred to the external cooling system. This direct liquid cooling with cold plates reduces the thermal resistance between the SSD and the coolant, allowing SSDs to sustain higher performance levels without throttling due to heat.
By employing liquid flow through (LFT) cooling, the Solidigm E1.S D7-PS1010 SSD significantly improves AI performance by enabling higher power densities and better thermal management, while also reducing data center cooling needs through effective heat removal and energy efficiency gains.
Serviceability and Cooling Efficiency
Advanced liquid-cooled cold plate designs make SSDs hot-pluggable and serviceable even within liquid cooling setups, ensuring maintainability without sacrificing cooling performance. Systems like Lenovo’s ThinkSystem SD650 V3 employing direct water cooling through cold plates can achieve up to 100% heat removal efficiency into water, reduce data center energy consumption by up to 40%, and increase system performance by up to 10% compared to air cooling.
Data Center Implications
By integrating cold-plate liquid cooling, data centers can attain quieter operation (due to less reliance on fans), higher computational density, and reduced PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness). This means AI workloads that generate significant thermal load can be handled more sustainably and with less infrastructure investment in traditional cooling.
Operational Considerations
Liquid cooling technologies do require attention to fluid purity and sensor integration for system reliability because cold plate channels can clog, impacting cooling efficacy. However, modern implementations and ecosystem partnerships mitigate these risks.
In summary, cold-plate SSDs in liquid-cooled environments enable higher AI workload performance by maintaining optimal thermal conditions, while substantially decreasing data center cooling demands, energy use, and operational complexity compared to traditional air cooling.
The Solidigm D7-PS1010 SSD, with its cold plate for heat conduction to liquid-cooling systems, is not just a storage solution, but an embedded system designed to leverage technology, such as data-and-cloud-computing, for exceptional performance in AI applications. Its data center implications include quieter operation, higher computational density, and reduced PUE, thanks to the integration of cold-plate liquid cooling, making it more sustainable for AI workloads that generate significant thermal load.
