SSD Liquid Cooling

Overview

SSD liquid cooling is an EDSFF standardization effort, framed at the 2025 OCP Global Summit as the first big next problem for the form factor family. The goal is one cold-plate solution per form factor that is backwards compatible, so a single drive design supports both air and liquid cooling — rather than each SSD vendor inventing its own. The in-development SFF liquid-cooling changes are intended to let a drive plug into older air-cooled systems, while NVMe power states let the system manage device power for backwards compatibility. The effort accelerated after FMS: a September 2025 OCP storage call on E1.S 9.5 liquid cooling led to a project kickoff with a first draft spec in review, with E3 liquid-cooling spec work introduced the following week.