Do Son 
Image: Silicon Motion
Taiwan-based solid-state drive (SSD) controller manufacturer Silicon Motion first previewed its MonTitan Reference Design Kit (RDK) suite in 2022. Now, after more than three years of rigorous testing, the company has begun supplying its 128TB SSD RDK to select strategic partners.
RDK, or Reference Design Kit, provides a blueprint for SSD development, incorporating the three core components of any solid-state drive: the controller chip, cache, and NAND flash memory. For SSD manufacturers seeking to build drives based on Silicon Motion’s controllers, the RDK serves as an essential foundation for product design and integration.
The MonTitan RDK is a purpose-built solution aimed at enterprise and data center environments. It is engineered on the PCIe Gen 5 platform and delivers sequential read speeds exceeding 14,000 MB/s, along with random read performance reaching up to 3,300K IOPS—achieving exceptional levels of data throughput.
This latest RDK features the enterprise-grade SM8366 dual-port PCIe controller, supporting PCIe Gen 5 x4, NVMe 2.0, and OCP 2.5 data center specifications. It enables SSD manufacturers to develop next-generation high-performance drives tailored for enterprise workloads and hyperscale data centers.
According to Silicon Motion, the MonTitan RDK offers a 25% improvement in random read efficiency compared to competing fifth-generation solutions, making it particularly well-suited for AI-driven workloads such as large language model (LLM) training and graph neural network (GNN) computations.
The solution also incorporates NVMe 2.0 FDP (Flexible Data Placement), which enhances write efficiency and endurance—dramatically extending the lifespan of QLC NAND flash, which is typically known for its limited durability.
In the near future, enterprise and data center SSD manufacturers are expected to roll out drives with capacities reaching up to 128TB. These drives will most commonly utilize U.2 or E3.S interfaces and protocols, which are not compatible with consumer-grade PCs. Thus, it may still be several years before 128TB SSDs become viable for the consumer market.
