Solidigm has unveiled a hot-swappable liquid-cooled enterprise SSD. The company expects for this to help remove any need for cooling fans and allow designers to create fully liquid-cooled AI servers and storage systems. They took some time to brief The SSD Guy about their new approach to heat removal.
Here’s what they were looking to accomplish: Hyperscalers and other large computing installations would like to liquid-cool all of the heat-generating elements of these servers. Today’s AI servers might already incorporate liquid-cooled GPUs, CPUs, and DRAM, but there have been challenges with SSDs. The only liquid-cooled SSDs today use bolt-on 3rd-party cooling plates that prevent the SSD from being hot-swapped. Furthermore, current SSD liquid cooling plates only chill one side of each SSD, limiting their efficacy.
Additionally, computing installations would like to migrate to smaller 1U AI servers, but that form factor can’t be achieved if the system’s SSDs are cooled with finned heat sinks.
Solidigm addressed this by designing the D7-PS1010 enterprise SSD which uses the E1.S 9.5mm form factor. This SSD is wrapped in a cooling system that evens the heat out between both sides of the SSD, allowing a cold plate on one side to effectively cool both sides of the SSD. Solidigm has also teamed up with an unnamed partner who will ship a compatible cooling chassis that allows SSDs to be swapped into and out of a small rack that presses a liquid cooling plate against one side of the SSD once it has been inserted.
They even shared a video to illustrate how it works.
Solidigm says that this is “one of the world’s first,” which begs the question: “Who else has something similar?” The SSD Guy is unaware of such an SSD from another source, and Solidigm isn’t telling of anything that it knows about.
Solidigm has demonstrated this system at GTC 2025, and says that the Solidigm E1.S SSD and cold-plate kit will be available in the second half of 2025. Meanwhile, a larger 15mm air-cooled version called the Solidigm D7-PS1010 E1.S will also be introduced. Since the SSD’s cooling system evens out the heat between front and back, it should be able to operate at higher power levels than standard SSDs, which can be several degrees hotter on one side that the other. The hotter side of an SSD is the one that limits its performance. With evened-out heat, thermal throttling should kick in less frequently to improve performance.
Objective Analysis keeps track of this kind of breakthrough technical trends to allow us to give our clients a clear view of what the future holds. To explore ways to put this to your own use please contact us to discuss ways that we can help.
And, if you’re wondering about that amazing first graphic, which is called “Splash Head”, it’s a conceptual drawing by artist Mark “Crash” McCreery, which I found on the Stan Winston School’s page on the special effects they created for the film “Terminator 2 – Judgement Day.” You may recall that the film’s villain was made of liquid metal. The Stan Winston School of Character Arts was kind enough to give me permission to use it. See more amazing art and film magic on their website.