Kioxia BG5 1TB SSD Review

The fifth generation Kioxia BG drive, the BG5, is the first of the series to use a PCIe Gen 4 x 4 interface. Along with the faster interface, the drive uses Kioxia's BiCS5 112-layer TLC 3D NAND. The BG5 comes in two module sizes, (M.2 2230 and the more familiar M.2 2280) and three capacities; 256GB, 512GB and 1TB.

The previous BG drive, the fourth generation BG4 only appeared in M.2 1620 and M.2 2230 form factors thanks to the controller and flash being combined in a single package using a PCIe 3 x4 interface. The new BG5 sees the NAND and controller separated out.

This is due to the increasing power demands of the new interface meeting the thermal limits of a single chip design. Keeping the two components separate allows for betting cooling of the individual components. Also Instead of a DRAM cache, it uses NVMe Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology, which uses a portion of the host memory (less than 100MB) to support caching demands.

An OEM part at present, Kioxia are aiming the BG5 at ultra-mobile, 2-in-1 notebook PCs, IoT/embedded devices and as boot drives for server and storage arrays. There is also a SED (Self-Encrypting Drive) version of the BG5 supporting the TCG OPAL 2.01 specification.

When it comes to Sequential performance, the official figures for the 1TB BG5 are up to 3,500MB/s for reads and up to 2,900MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn't hit either of those maximums with test results of 3,280MB/s for reads and 2,770MB/s for writes. However, using our own Sequential tests we could confirm the official ratings with peak figures of 3,534MB/s for reads and 2,914MB/s for writes.

Testing the 4K performance of the drive, we couldn't get close to the official maximums of up to 500,000 IOPS for reads and 450,000 IOPS for writes using our 4-threaded tests. The best read/write figures we saw were 359,765 IOPS and 281,205 IOPS respectively. However, turning to the Peak Performance profile of CrystalDiskMark 8 we could confirm both 530,527 IOPS for reads and 486,172 IOPS for writes.

Kioxia's BG5 isn't the fastest Gen4 drive we've seen by a long chalk, indeed some of the high-end Gen3 drives will give it a run for its money but what will be useful for OEMs is that the BG5 does it using fewer PCIe lanes than a Gen 3 drive, freeing up lanes for other components in a system.

Pros:

• Choice of form factors (M.2 Type 2230 and M.2 Type 2280).
• Doesn't get too hot when pushed.

Cons:

• OEM part only at present.
• Not the fastest Gen4 drive we've seen.

KitGuru says: Although an OEM part, the BG5 may well find its way to the consumer space in one form or another in the not-too-distant future.

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