Once reserved primarily for archival use, large-scale data lakes are now asked to support increasingly active workloads. New AI applications, analytics pipelines, and emerging digital services are driving up the “temperature” of previously considered cold data. The result is a growing middle ground, where data is accessed too frequently for HDDs to handle efficiently, but not hot enough to warrant the cost of performance SSDs. E2 is a new flash form factor to address this emerging “warm” storage tier. It is designed to bridge the gap between high-capacity hard drives and traditional enterprise SSDs, offering a more practical balance of performance, density, and cost.