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Kioxia's latest addition to their Exceria lineup of PCIe Gen4 SSDs is the Exceria Plus G3, a drive aimed at the mainstream market using a combination of a Phison controller and BiCS NAND. With the 2TB model retailing for barely £100, let's find out if this drive is worth buying.
At launch just two capacities; 1TB and 2TB, make up the Exceria Plus G3 product line. At the heart of the Plus G3 is a Phison PS5021-E21 4-channel DRAM-less controller which is used in combination with Kioxia BiCS TLC NAND although at the time of writing, Kioxia hasn't disclosed which version of BiCS it is using in the drive.
Kioxia rates both drives' Sequential performance as up to 5,000MB/s for reads and up to 3,900MB/s for writes. As for 4K random performance, both drives have the same up to 950,000 IOPS rating for writes while the 2TB drive is rated as up to 680,000 IOPS for reads the 1TB drive is faster at up to 770,000 IOPs.
The TBW endurance for the Exceria Plus G3 drives is quoted as up to 600TB for the 1TB drive and 1.200TB for the flagship 2TB drive and Kioxia backs the range with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB.
- NAND Components: Kioxia BiCS TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Phison PS5021-E21.
- Cache: None.
- Interface: PCIe Gen 4 x4, NVMe 1.4.
- Form Factor: M.2 2280.
- Dimensions: 22.15 x 80.15 x 2.63mm.
- Drive Weight: 7.4g.
Firmware Version: ELFA01.2
Kioxia's Exceria Plus G3 comes in a compact box with an image of the drive on the front, along with a sticker displaying the capacity of the drive and the drive's Sequential read speed (up to 5,000MB/s). The rear of the box has a description of the drive’s form factor, a small logo representing it uses BiCS Flash, PCIe Gen 4 x4 interface and has a 5-year warranty.
The Exceria Plus G3 is built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format.
With the drive being built on a single-sided format, all the components are to be found on one side of the PCB. Alongside the Phison PS5021-E21 controller are four packages of BiCS TLC NAND (coded TH58LKT2Z25BA8K). Phison's PS5021-E21T is a 4-channel controller built on a 12nm process using single-CPU architecture (built-in ARM Cortex-R5). Designed for DRAM-less operation, it supports both TLC and QLC NAND with a transfer rate of up to 1600MT/s and has a capacity limit of 4TB. Data reliability is provided by Phison's 4th generation LDPC ECC along with End-To-End Data Path Protection and Smart ECC 2.0. It also supports AES 256-bit Encryption.
Kioxia's SSD Utility drive management software has had a bit of a refresh with a better-looking interface. There are four main sections; Disk Information, System, Settings and Help. All the key tools are to be found on the Disk Information page under separate tabs. These allow you to check drive capacity usage, health and temperature, SMART information, drive alerts and perform operations such as firmware updates and secure erase.
For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real-world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system.
This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits.
Main system:
AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, 32GB DDR5-6000, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050 and a Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme motherboard.
Other drives
Corsair MP600 GS 2TB
Corsair MP600 PRO 2TB
Corsair MP600 PRO XT 2TB
Crucial T500 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 7000e 2TB
HP FX900 Pro 2TB
Kingston Fury Renegade Heatsink 2TB
Kingston KC3000 2TB
Kioxia Exceria Pro 2TB
Lexar NM790 4TB
Lexar NM790 with Heatsink 4TB
Lexar Professional NM800PRO Heatsink 2TB
MSI Spatium M480 2TB
Netac NV7000-t 2TB
Patriot Viper VP4300 2TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 2TB
Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus 4TB
Samsung SSD990 PRO 2TB
Solidigm P41 Plus 2TB
Seagate Lightsaber Collection Special Edition FireCuda 2TB
Seagate FireCuda 530 2TB
WD Black SN850X Heatsink 2TB
WD_Black SN770M 2TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 4.
CrystalMark 8.0.0.
AS SSD 2.0.
IOMeter.
UL Solutions PC Mark 10.
UL Solutions 3DMark Storage Benchmark.
Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark.
All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disable delete notify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v8.0.
Using the default CrystalBenchMark 8 4K QD1 T-1 benchmark the read result of 60.19MB/s sees the Exceria Plus G3 sitting in last place on our results chart. However, its write score of 350.50MB/s is the fastest we've seen to date for a 2TB class Gen 4 drive in this particular test.
Looking at the default benchmark result screens we could confirm both the official Sequential maximums of up to 5,000MB/s and 3,900MB/s for reads and writes respectively with a read test result of 5,074.24MB/s with writes at 3,974.20MB/s.
The Exceria Plus G3's Sequential read test result of 5,074MB/s puts the drive in the bottom section of our results chart.
Peak Performance profile.
Kioxia quotes 4K random performance figures for the 2TB version of the Exceria Plus G3 of up to 680,000 IOPS for reads and up to 950,000 IOPs for writes. When tested with the Peak Performance profile test in CrystalDiskMark 8 we could confirm those figures and even better them a little. The best read score we saw was 687,838 IOPS while the best write result was 967,388 IOPS using the default test.
As with the default test, we could confirm the official Sequential read and write performance figures with test results of 5,036MB/s and 3,974MB/s for reads and writes respectively.
Real World profile.
In the Real World profiles test the drive's Sequential read result of 3,236MB/s sees it firmly in last place on our results chart. However, its write performance of 3,957MB/s is some 721MB/s faster than the read.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage system performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturer's RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage.
We are using version 4.1 for our NVMe disk tests.
With the ATTO benchmark results the drive fell just short of the official 5,00MB/s and 3,900MB/s for reads and writes respectively, with reads at 4,738MB/s and writes at 3,710MB/s.
During the ATTO test run, the read performance peaked at the 2MB mark at 4,730MB/s and it kept at that mark more or less for the rest of the test run. When it comes to write performance, the drive starts to plateau to some extent from the 64KB mark.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read-and-write tests, as well as random read-and-write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. It uses
incompressible data samples which many drives struggle with, so results can be viewed as the worst case scenarios. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures.
The Exceria Plus G3's read score of 1911 sees it sitting in the penultimate place in our results chart. However, its write score of 4320 is very impressive, it's the fourth fastest we've seen for this class of drive to date.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the Sequential read and write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 128KB, Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
128KB Sequential Read / Write.
With our 128KB Sequential tests, we could confirm both the official ratings for the drive of up to 5,000MB/s for reads and up to 3,900MB/s for writes with best test result figures of 5,050MB/s and 3,962MB/s for reads and writes respectively.
128KB Sequential Read performance v QD compared.
In relation to the drives sitting around it, the Exceria Plus G3 performs best at QDs 1 and 4. At QDs 2 and 32, it's very close to the bottom of the chart.
128KB Sequential Write performance v QD compared.
The Kioxia Exceria Plus G3's best performance comes at QD1 where it sits third in the results chart but as the QD deepens the performance drops off and the drive falls down the table.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random read performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
Officially the 2TB Exceria Plus G3 is rated as up to 680,000 IOPS for 4K random reads. With our four-threaded tests, we couldn't get close to the official figure with a peak test result of 488,618 IOPS (QD32).
4K random read performance v QD compared.
At QD1 the drive sits plum last in the results table but as the queue depth deepens it begins to climb up the charts until at QD32 it sits inside the top 10 fastest Gen 4 drives we've tested to date.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8‘s custom settings to test the 4K random write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths. The setup for the tests is listed below.
Transfer Request Size: 4KB, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
Kioxia rates the 4K random write performance of the Exceria Plus G3 as up to 950,000 IOPS. As with the random reads, with our four threaded tests, we couldn't get close to that number. The best test figure we saw was 412,404 IOPS (QD8).
4K random write performance v QD compared.
At QD1 the drive sits on top of the chart, the fastest 2TB class Gen 4 drive we've seen to date, being some 16,841 IOPS faster than the nearest rival, Crucial's T500. However, as the QD deepens the drive begins to sink down the chart but it never drops below the top 10 drives we've tested to date.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8’s custom settings to test the 4K 70/30 mixed read/write performance of the drive through a range of queue depths using a single thread and four threads.
Using a single thread the 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 produced results that ranged from 19,197 IOPS (78.63MB/s) at QD1 up to 174,526 IOPS (714.86MB/s) at QD32 where the performance starts to plateau off. Switching to four threads the performance rises from 74,865 IOPS (306.64MB/s) at QD1 up to 488,507 IOPS (2,000MB/s) at QD32 with no sign of levelling out.
We used CrystalDiskMark 8 to test the random performance of the drive at lower queue depths (QD1 – QD8 where most of the everyday workloads occur) using 1 to 4 threads.
Random Read
In the random read QD1-QD8 tests the drive displayed smooth increases in performance through all the used threads and tested queue depths. At QD1 the drive speed ranges from 14,401 IOPS (58.98MB/s) using a single thread up to 56,997 IOPS (233.46MB/s) using four threads. At the end of the test at QD 8, the single-thread performance had increased to 104,891 IOPS (429.63MB/s) while the four-threaded test reached 285,286 IOPS (1,086.53MB/s).
Random Write
In the 4K write tests, the performance rose quickly from QD1 to QD2 for all four tested threads with the fastest rise seen in the three and four-threaded tests. All four threads see the rate of increase in performance start slowing from QD2 onwards up to the end of the test run at QD8 in a consistent fashion. QD1 performance ranges from 85,211 IOPS (349MB/s) using a single thread up to 285,047 IOPS (1,167MB/s) using four threads.
In our read-throughput test, the Exceria Plus G3's peak throughput came at the 16MB block mark, at the end of the test, at 4,223.84MB/s, some 777MB/s short of the official maximum read rate
That peak read result of 4,223.84MB/s sees the slot into the third from last position in the results table.
In the write throughput tests, the drive peaked at the 2MB block at 3,901.339MB/s, bang on the official Sequential write rating. The drive's performance drops at the 4MB mark before rallying back up to 3,803MB/s at the end of the test run.
The test result of 3,901MB/s sees the drive in the penultimate position in the results table.
The PCMark 10 Full System Drive Benchmark uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and common tasks to fully test the performance of the fastest modern drives. The benchmark is designed to measure performance of fast system drives using the SATA bus at the low end and devices connected via PCI Express at the high end.
The goal of the benchmark is to show meaningful real-world performance differences between fast storage technologies such as SATA, NVMe, and Intel’s Optane. The Full System Drive Benchmark uses 23 traces, running 3 passes with each trace. It typically takes an hour to run.
Traces used:
Booting Windows 10.
Adobe Acrobat – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Illustrator – starting the application until usable Adobe Premiere Pro – starting the application until usable.
Adobe Photoshop – starting the application until usable.
Battlefield V – starting the game until the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4 – starting the game until the main menu.
Overwatch – starting the game until main menu.
Using Adobe After Effects.
Using Microsoft Excel.
Using Adobe Illustrator.
Using Adobe InDesign.
Using Microsoft PowerPoint.
Using Adobe Photoshop (heavy use).
Using Adobe Photoshop (light use).
cp1 Copying 4 ISO image files, 20 GB in total, from a secondary drive to the target drive (write test).
cp2 Making a copy of the ISO files (read-write test).
cp3 Copying the ISO to a secondary drive (read test).
cps1Copying 339 JPEG files, 2.37 GB in total, to the target drive (write test).
cps2 Making a copy of the JPEG files (read-write test).
cps3 Copying the JPEG files to another drive (read test).
The 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 does a pretty good job of dealing with PCMark10's Full System Drive Benchmark. It averaged 248MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being 301MB/s for the startup test trace of Premiere Pro. For the Adobe usage traces it averaged 520.8MB/s for the five tests, with the fastest being the 1,091MB/s for the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace.
The drive averaged 744MB/s for the three gaming test traces, the fastest being Battlefield V at 898MB/s just ahead of Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 at 892MB/s and finally Overwatch at 443MB/s. When it came to the file transfers, the fastest was the cp1 write test at 4,192MB/s. Overall the drive averaged 2,196MB/s for the six file transfer tests.
The Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 produces an overall bandwidth figure for the benchmark of 551.34MB/s which is good enough to put the drive into the top 10 in our results chart.
The 3DMark Storage Benchmark uses traces recorded from popular games and gaming-related activities to measure real-world gaming performance.
Traces used:
Battlefield V
Loading Battlefield™ V from launch to the main menu.
Call of Duty Black Ops 4
Loading Call of Duty®: Black Ops 4 from launch to the main menu.
Overwatch
Loading Overwatch® from launch to the main menu.
Game Move
Copying the Steam folder for Counter-Strike®: Global Offensive from an external SSD to the system drive.
Game Recording
Recording a 1080p gameplay video at 60 FPS with OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) while playing Overwatch®.
Installing Game
Installing The Outer Worlds® from the Epic Games Launcher.
Game Saving
Saving progress in The Outer Worlds game.
When tested with 3DMark’s Storage Test, the Exceria Plus G3 produced an average game loading bandwidth figure for the three games of 756.98MB/s with an overall average access time for the three of 75µs.
In the game moving, recording, installing and saving test traces the drive averaged 1,050.20MB/s for the four tests, the second fastest we've seen to date in this test for a Gen 4 drive. For this group of tests, the drive had an average access time of 47µs.
The average bandwidth figure for the 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 for the complete benchmark run was 598.75MB/s which sees it in the middle section of the results chart.
The Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark uses actual maps and playable characters to assign a score to your PC and rate its performance including scene loading times.
The benchmark gives an overall load time as well as loading times by scene.
The 2TB Exceria Plus G3 handles the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark pretty well. It sits comfortably inside the top 10 for all but one of the tests ending up in fifth place on the Total Loading Time chart.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs.
The Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 doesn't appear to have any form of heatspreader installed but saying that the product label seems to be thicker than normal but there isn't any sign of anything like a copper layer being present. For safety's sake, you should use the drive with any form of cooling that your motherboard provides. We relied on the hefty built-in heatsink on our Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme test rig motherboard.
The hottest the drive got was when it was being pushed very hard during the CrystalDiskMark 8 0 fill write test where it reached 39° C, comfortably under the stated maximum operating temperature of 85° C. For the non-4 K tests the drive averaged 35°C while for the 4K-based tests, the average was 30°C.
To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 2TB Kingston KC3000.
Transfer Details
Windows 10 backup – 118GB.
Data file – 100GB.
BluRay Movie – 42GB.
Windows 11 iso – 5.4GB.
File folder – 50GB – 28,523 files.
Steam folder – 222GB (8 games: Alien Isolation, Battlefield 4, BioShock Infinite, Crysis 3, Grand Theft Auto V, Shadow Of Mordor, Skyrim, The Witcher3 Wild Hunt).
Movie demos 8K – 21GB – (11 demos).
Raw Movie Clips 4K – 16GB – (9 MP4V files).
Movie folder – 12GB – 15 files – (8 @ .MKV, 4 @ .MOV, 3 @ MP4).
Photo Folder – 10GB – 304 files – (171 @ .RAW, 105 @ JPG, 21 @ .CR2, 5 @ .DNG).
Audio Folder – 10GB – 1,483 files – (1479 @ MP3, 4 @ .FLAC files).
Single large image – 5GB – 1.5bn pixel photo.
3D Printer File Folder – 4.25GB – (166 files – 105 @ .STL, 38 @ .FBX, 11 @ .blend, 5 @ .lwo, 4 @ .OBJ, 3@ .3ds).
AutoCAD File Folder – 1.5GB (80 files – 60 @ .DWG and 20 @.DXF).
The 2TB Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 averaged 1,566MB/s when writing the 13 transfer tests. The fastest was 100GB Data file transfer at 3,979MB/s with the slowest being the 113MB/s for the 10GB Photo Folder transfer. The drive was much more efficient reading back the data averaging 4,273MB/s for the 13 tests. This time around the fastest was the 12GB Movie folder at 5,030MB/s with the 50GB file folder transfer the sloest at 1,634MB/s.
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.
Discuss on our Facebook page HERE.
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.
