Odie Killen | Source | VP of Server and Storage Engineering at Viking Enterprise Solutions

The industry will see an increased uptake in E1 and E3 drive form factors, as these NVMe-based devices provide improved performance and lower latency over traditional SAS-based SSDs. The overall physical design of these products also enables better management of airflow, increasing thermal efficiency. The E1 form factor and its single-port design lends itself well to hyperscalers and companies that have more node-based, erasure-coding protection schemes and architectures, where entire nodes can fail and go offline without degrading access to data. The newer E3 form factor, which includes a dual-port design, ensures high availability and will be the winner for NVMe Gen 5 SSDs in the traditional enterprise storage market. The E3 design will eventually replace U.2 and U.3 products.