Cisco UCSXE-NVE17T6K2V9 | 7.6TB E3.S NVMe Gen 5 SED FIPS Enterprise SSD

Q: What Cisco servers support this E3.S NVMe drive?
A: This drive is designed for Cisco UCS X-Series modular compute nodes including the UCS X215c M8 (in UCS X9508 chassis) and UCS XE130c M8 (in UCS XE9305 chassis). These platforms support front-facing E3.S NVMe drive slots with PCIe Gen 5 connectivity for maximum performance.

Q: What does 1 DWPD endurance mean for this drive?
A: 1 DWPD means you can write the full 7.6TB capacity once per day for the rated lifespan. This read-intensive drive is optimized for workloads like virtualization, online transaction processing, business intelligence, and software-defined storage where read operations significantly outnumber writes.

Q: Can this drive be used for boot volumes?
A: Yes, E3.S NVMe drives can be used for booting in supported Cisco UCS platforms. However, for redundancy, many deployments use dual M.2 SATA SSDs in hardware RAID 1 for boot volumes and reserve E3.S slots for high-performance application storage.

Q: What are the benefits of the E3.S form factor?
A: E3.S provides significantly higher storage density than traditional 2.5-inch drives—systems can support 32 or more E3.S drives versus 12 traditional drives in the same space. The form factor offers improved airflow, hot-swap capability, PCIe Gen 5 performance, and power profiles up to 25W for the 1T thickness variant.

Q: Is FIPS encryption enabled by default?
A: The drive includes FIPS 140-validated self-encrypting drive hardware, but encryption typically requires configuration through Cisco UCS Manager or Cisco Intersight management policies. Once enabled, all data is automatically encrypted at the hardware level with no performance penalty.