Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 2TB SSD Review

The latest addition to Kioxia's extensive Exceria range of SSDs is the Exceria Plus G3, a Gen 4 drive aimed squarely at the mainstream market. Just two capacites make up the Plus G3 range at the time of writing, 1TB and the flagship 2TB model. The Exceria Plus G3 uses a combination of a Phison PS5021-E21 controller and Kioxia's own BiCS NAND. The PS5021-E21 is a 4-channel DRAM-less designed controller with a transfer rate of up to 1600MT/s.

Kioxia rates the 2TB Exceria Plus G3 as up to 5,000MB/s for Sequential reads and up to 3,900MB/s for Sequential writes. Using the ATTO benchmark to test the drive we came up a little short of these maximum figures with our results of 4,738MB/s for reads and 3,710MB/s for writes. Switching over to the CrystalDiskMark 8 benchmark we could confirm those official figures with test results of 5,074MB/s and 3.974MB/s for reads and writes respectively.

The drive's 4K performance is listed as up to 680,000 IOPS for reads and up to 950,000 IOPS for writes. Using our 4-threading we couldn't get close to these figures with a best read test result of 488,618 IOPS with writes at 412,404 IOPS. Once again switching over to CrystalDiskMark 8 (in this case the Performance Profile) saw confirmation of the official figures with best test results of 687,838 IOPS for reads and 968,388 IOPS for writes.

The drive doesn't come with any form of a heatsink, not even something as simple as a layer of copper under the label, although the label does seem to be a bit thicker than normal. Gen 4 drives do tend to get quite toasty when pushed hard and we would always recommend using a motherboard's drive cooling solution whenever possible. Sitting under the hefty built-in heatsink on our Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme test the Exceria Plus G3 stayed nice and cool, never getting close to its official maximum temperature.

We found the 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 on Overclockers UK for £104.99 HERE.

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Pros

• Solid Sequential performance.
• Endurance.
• Price.

Cons

• Couldn't get close to the official 4K maximums in some of our testing.
• DRAM-less design.

KitGuru says: Kioxia's latest drive, the Exceria Plus G3 isn't the fastest Gen 4 drive we've ever seen overall (but it did top a couple of our charts) but if you looking to upgrade to a mainstream Gen 4 drive, it's well worth considering as Kioxia has given it every chance with some pretty competitive pricing.

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