Today all the EDSFF family of form factors share the same protocol (NVMe), the same interface (PCIe), the same edge connector (SFF-TA-1002), the same pinout and functions (SFF-TA-1009). There is a vast diversity of Enterprise and Datacenter applications. Data center infrastructure can be optimized in various ways for maximum capacity per rack unit, max performance, balanced performance to capacity, networking bandwidth, or for higher performance and TDP CPUs. Having a flexible and scalable family of form factors allows for optimization for different use cases, different media types on SSDs (e.g. TLC, QLC, SCM), scalable performance on PCIe 4.0 & 5.0, improving data center TCO through optimized power and thermal management, while maintaining key commonalities for compatibility and faster development. SFF-TA-1012 has been published to SNIA to show the breadth of the SFF-TA-1002 ecosystem, and provide pinout definitions for EDSFF SSDs (SFF-TA-1009), OCP NIC, Gen Z, PECFF, SNIA NVMe-oF ethernet drives, and future high speed devices.
