VDURA CEO's Long Live the Short King Blog
Blocks and Files, Tuesday, October 27th, 2026
VDURA CEO Ken Claffey argues that for KV cache flash tiers, write bandwidth and drive count matter more than SSD capacity.
Blocks and Files covers a blog by VDURA CEO Ken Claffey extending a SemiAnalysis argument about HBM stack height to NVMe SSDs used for KV cache tiering.
Because larger drives add capacity without more bandwidth, he argues write bandwidth matters more than capacity, citing a Kioxia SSD with eight times the capacity at the same write bandwidth.
He proposes sizing drive count by required bandwidth and per-drive throughput, choosing the smallest drive that reaches the target count, and placing remaining data on a hard disk tier built for throughput.
VDURA presents its parallel file system with built-in S3 support as a way to move data between tiers fast enough to keep accelerators busy.