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Kioxia's latest drive for the consumer market space is the Exceria Plus G4, the company's first Gen 5 consumer-orientated SSD. Using a combination of a Phison controller and Kioxia 218-layer NAND, it offers sequential read and write speeds of up to 10,000MB/s and 8,200MB/s, respectively.
At the time of writing, the Exceria Plus G4 lineup consists of just two capacities, 1TB and 2TB (the drive we are looking at here). At the heart of the drive is a Phison PS5031-E31T 4-channel controller paired up with Kioxia's BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC NAND.
Kioxia rates the Sequential performance of the 2TB Exceria Plus G4 as up to 10,000MB/s for reads and up to 8,200MB/s for writes. The 1TB drive gets the same 10,000MB/s figure for reads, but writes are down to 7,900MB/s. Random performance is quoted as up to 1,300,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,400,000 IOPS for writes for both drives.
The 2TB drive gets a TBW endurance rating of 1,200TB while the 1TB gets 600TB, and Kioxia backs the drives with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 2TB.
- NAND Components: Kioxia BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Phison PS5031-E31T.
- Cache: none, DRAM-less design.
- Interface: PCIe Gen 5 x4, NVMe 2.0.
- Form Factor: M.2 2280.
- Dimensions: 80.15 x 22.15 x 2.38mm.
- Drive Weight: 5.7g.
Firmware Version: EVFAJ1.0
Kioxia's Exceria Plus G4 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 10,000MB/s). The rear of the box has a description of the drive’s form factor, a small logo representing it uses BiCS Flash, PCIe 5.0 (NVMe 2.0c) interface and has a 5-year warranty.
The Exceria Plus G4 is built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format. The product label on the front of the drive incorporates what looks like a copper strip to help get rid of some of the heat generated by the drive.
The drive is built on a single-sided format, so all the components are on one side of the PCB. Alongside the Phison PS5031-E31T controller sit two 1TB packages of Kioxia BiCS8, 218-layer 3D TLC NAND.
The four-channel Phison PS5031-E31T is the company's second PCIe Gen 5 controller and holds a couple of world's firsts – first Gen5 controller for the mainstream market segment and the first DRAM-less Gen5 design. Built on a 7nm process, the E31T uses HMB technology instead of a dedicated DRAM chip. It supports four NAND channels with data transfer speeds of up to 3600 MT/s. Data reliability is provided by Phison's 7th 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 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
Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO 4TB
Biwin Black Opal X570 PRO 2TB
ADATA Legend 970 2TB
Corsair MP700 PRO SE 4TB
Corsair MP700 PRO 2TB
Corsair MP700 Elite 2TB
Crucial T705 2TB
Crucial T700 2TB
Crucial T700 with Heatsink 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 10000 2TB
Klevv Genuine G360 2TB
Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 2TB
Seagate FireCuda 520 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 disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure the theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v8.0.5.
Kioxia's Exceria Plus G4 does very well in the CrystalDiskMark 8 4K QD1 T1 test, with a read score of 90.17MB/s, the second fastest behind Samsung's SSD 9100 PRO. Its write result of 348.73MB/s is also the second fastest we've seen to date.
As can be seen from the benchmarking result screens, we could confirm the drive's official sequential ratings of up to 10,000MB/s for reads and up to 8,500MB/s for writes and even better them a little with default test figures of 10,397.38MB/s for reads and 8,790.26MB/s for writes.
Those 10,397MB/s and 8,79MB/s result figures are the best we've seen to date for a Phison PS5031-E31T powered drive.
Peak Performance Profile
We can confirm the official random 4K figures for the drive of up to 1,300,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,500,000 IOPS for writes and, indeed, better them a little using the Peak Performance profile of CrystalDiskMark 8 with default test results of 1,451,170 IOPS for reads and 1,606,249 IOPS for writes.
Once again, we could confirm the official Sequential figures with test results of 10,408MB/s for reads and 8,793MB/s for writes.
Real World Profile
Using the Real World profile tests in CrystalDiskMark 8, the drive produced Sequential read / write results of 5,562MB/s and 8.693MB/s, respectively, putting it at the foot of the results chart.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems 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. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data.
We are using version 4.1 for our NVMe disk tests with a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance.
Using the ATTO benchmark, we couldn't hit the official sequential read figure of 10,000MB/s, but we got pretty close with a result of 9,690MB/s. However, we could confirm the official write rating with a test result of 8,230MB/s.
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 Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 sits below the other two drives using the Phison PS5031-E31T, the reference Phison E31T design and Corsair's Corsair MP700 Elite with Heatsink.
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.
128KB Sequential Read / Write.
Transfer Request Size: 128KB, Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32.
In this test, the results confirmed the official Sequential ratings of the drive of up to 10,000MB/s and 8,200MB/s for read and write, respectively. The drive produced figures of 10,335MBs for reads and 8,747MB/s for writes, both at QD32.
128KB Sequential Read v QD compared
At QD 1, the drive sits at the bottom of the results chart behind the two other divers using the E31T, the Phison reference design and Corsair's MP700 Elite. At QDs 2 and 32, it sits between them, while at QD4, it's slightly faster than both of them.
128KB Sequential Write v QD compared
When it comes to the sequential write test results the Kioxia Exceria G4 sits in last place at QD1. However at QDs 2, 4 and 32, the drive seperates the two other drives using the Phison E31T controller, the Phison reference design and the Corsair MP700 Elite.
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.
Using our 4-threaded test results, we couldn't get close to the official maximum random read figure of 1,300,000 IOPS; the best we saw was 506,688 IOPS at QD16 before the performance dropped back to 500,221 IOPS at the end of the test run at QD32.
4K Random Read v QD performance compared
At QDs1 and 2, Kioxia's Exceria Plus G4 is the second-fastest Gen5 consumer drive we've seen to date for this test, and it's the fastest E31 T-based drive we've seen at these queue depths. However, at QD4, the drive dropped to last place in the results chart, and at QD3,2 it recovers slightly.
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.
As with the random read results, we couldn't get close to the official maximum of 1,400,000 IOPS using our four-threaded tests. The best we saw was 443,203 IOPS at QD16. After this peak, the performance dropped slightly to finish the test run at QD32 at 438,733 IOPS.
4K Random Write v QD performance compared.
At QD1, the drive sits in a mid-table position. As the queue depth deepens, the drive sinks slowly down the result charts.
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 drive's performance ranges from 27,385 IOPS at QD1 up to 173,617 IOPS at QD32. The performance peaks at QD16 at 174,168 IOPS.
Switching to four threads, the drive produces 119,010 IOPS at QD1 and 485,541 IOPS at QD32. As with the single-thread performance, the drive actually peaked at QD16 at 488,156 IOPS.
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 Reads
In the QD1- QD8 random read tests, the drive produced smooth increases in performance as the queue depth deepened without any noticeable dramas. The Kioxia Exceria Plus G4's QD1 performance ranged from 21,804 IOPS (89.31MB/s) with a single thread up to 94,050 IOPS (385.23MB/s) using four threads.
At QD8, the single-threaded performance had risen to 156,566 IOPS (641.29MB/s), while the four threaded performance ended at 443,318 IOPS (1,815.83MB/s).
Random Writes
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. The rate of acceleration then slowed, with the performance for all four threads beginning to plateau out.
In our read-throughput test, the drive peaked at the 16MB block mark at 7,334.59MB/s, some 2,666MB/s short of the official maximum figure of 10,000MB/s. The performance dipped between the 2MB and 4MB block sizes but soon recovered.
That 7,334.59MB/s result sees the drive in last position in the results table, slower than the other two drives above it on the table that use the Phison PS5031-E31T controller, Corsair's MP700 Elite and Phison's own reference design.
In the write throughput test, the drive peaked at 8,278.19MB/s at the end of the test, confirming the maximum official rating of 8,200MB/s.
Although the test result confirms the official figure for drive, it is still 61MB/s slower than Phison's reference design and 162.36MB/s behind the Corsair MP700 Elite (with heatsink), the other two drives using the E31T controller in this list.
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 the 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 version of Kioxia's Exceria Plus G4 drive didn't exactly cover itself in glory in PCMark10's Full System Drive Benchmark. It did a good enough job running through all the test traces, but nothing really stood out.
It averaged 285MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being 350MB/s for the startup test trace of Premiere Pro, the slowest being the Lightroom startup trace at 225MB/s.
Switching to the five Adobe usage traces, it averaged 583.6MB/s for the five tests, including the 1,262MB/s figure for the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace.
When it came to the three gaming test traces, the drive averaged 554MB/s, with the fastest being Battlefield V at 910MB/s and the slowest, Overwatch, at 434MB/s. Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 was in the middle of these two at 754MB/s. Switching over to the file transfer tests, the drive averaged 2,555MB/s for the six tests, the fastest of which was the cp1 Write test at 4,832MB/s.
With an overall bandwidth figure of 595.11MB/s, the drive sits in last place in the table, some distance from the next slowest drive, Corsair's MP700 Elite with Heatsink, which also uses the Phison PS5031-E31T controller.
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.
In 3DMark’s Storage Test, the Exceria Plus G4 produced an average game loading bandwidth figure for the three games of 798.38MB/s with an average access time of 63µs, which is more or less the same performance as the Phison E31T reference design and Corsair's MP700 Elite, which also uses the E31T.
In the Game Move, Recording, Installing and Saving traces part of the benchmark, the drive averaged 1,065.32MB/s with an average access time for the four tests of 42.5µs, which sees the drive in last place on the table, quite some way back from the other E31T equipped drives.
The average bandwidth figure for the E31T for the complete benchmark run was 655.51MB/s, which puts the drive in last place in the results table.
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.
Kioxia's Exceria Plus G4 doesn't appear to handle the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark very well at all, sitting in last place for all bar one (Load Scene 1) of the scene-loading tests.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs.
The Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 uses Phison's latest Gen5 controller, the PS5031-E31T. The new controller has been designed to run cooler than the previous generations of Gen 5 drives, so it does not need the large active or passive cooling solutions that we saw on the first few Gen 5 drives.
The Exceria Plus G4 has what looks like, at first glance, to be a strip of copper built into the product label. We tested it sitting under the passive heatsink that comes with the Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme motherboard we used for testing.
Under benchmarking, the hottest the drive got was 44°C when the drive was running the CrystalDiskMark 8 Sequential QD1-32 T1 Write test. For the majority of the testing, the drive averaged 38°C, which for a Gen5 drive is very impressive, while the 4 K-based tests averaged out at 33°C, another impressive figure.
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 Kioxia's Exceria Plus G4 averaged 4,259MB/s when writing the 8 transfer tests, with the fastest being 7,168MB/s for the 4K Raw Movie Clips folder, with the 50GB file folder transfer being the slowest at 572MB/s.
Reading back the data, the average was 4,634MB/s, and this time around, it was the 100GB data transfer that was the fastest at 6,023MB/s and again, it was the 50GB file folder transfer that was the slowest at 1,190MB/s.
Kioxia's latest Exceria Plus drive is the fourth generation of the Plus range of drives, hence the G4 branding. The drive is Kioxia's first using a PCIe Gen 5 interface aimed at the consumer market space.
For the pair of Exceria Plus G4 drives (at the time of writing, it's only available as 1TB or 2TB models), Kioxia has used Phison's latest Gen 5 controller, the E31T. Sequential performance for the 2TB G4 is quoted as up to 10,000MB/s for reads and up to 8,200MB/s for writes. The 1TB model gets the same read rating but with writes down at 7,900MB/s. Both capacities are rated the same when it comes to 4K random performance – up to 1,300,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,400,000 IOPS for writes.
Phison created the world's first PCIe 5 controller, the mighty PS5026-E26 and now they have a couple more firsts with the PS5031-E31T. It's the first Gen5 controller aimed at the mainstream market segment, and its the world's first DRAM-less design for Gen 5. The world has moved on since the 12nm process 8-channel E26 was introduced as the E31T is built on a 7nm process and supports four channels and has been designed to run more efficiently and cooler than the E26. Also, DRAM-less design helps to maintain lower temperatures.
Benchmarking the drive with the ATTO tool, we couldn't quite confirm the rated 10,000MB/s maximum speed for the drive, but the best we saw of 9,690MB/s is still pretty close. Writes, on the other hand, were spot on at 8,230MB/s.
Officially, the 2TB drive is rated up to 1,300,000 IOPS and up to 1,400,000 IOPS, respectively, for 4K random reads /writes. With our threaded tests, we could get nowhere near the official maximums, with the best test figures of 506,688 IOPS (QD16) for reads and 443,203 IOPS (QD16) for writes. Switching over to the Peak Performance profile settings in CrystalDiskMark 8, we could confirm the official read /write figures with a default read score of 1,451,170 IOPS with writes at 1,606,249 IOPS.
The Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 doesn't have a heatsink, but it does have a layer of what looks like copper built into the product label to help disperse heat. Phison has claimed that for everyday use, the E31T doesn't need a heatsink, but we stayed on the cautious side and tested it under the heatsink of our Gigabyte AORUS X670E Xtreme motherboard. During testing, the hottest the drive got was 44°C when the drive was running the CrystalDiskMark 8 Sequential QD1-32 T1 Write test. For the majority of the testing, the drive averaged 38°C, while the 4K-based tests averaged out at 33°C. both figures are very impressive for a Gen 5 drive.
We found the 2TB version of Kioxia's Exceria Plus G4 on Scan UK for £154.99 (inc VAT) HERE.
Pros
- QDs1 and 2 4K write performance.
- Runs cool for a Gen5 drive.
- Well priced.
Cons
- Only two capacities at launch.
- Disappointing write performance in some tests.
- DRAM-less.
KitGuru says: Kioxia's Exceria Plus G4 is only the second retail drive we've seen using Phison's latest E31T controller, and it uses it to pretty good effect. It offers 10,000MB/s and 8,200MB/s read/write performance for the mainstream market and produces that performance while running relatively cool. Kioxia have given it a fighting chance with a competitive price tag.
