Kioxia Exceria Pro 2TB Review

The Exceria Pro is Kioxia‘s first PCIe Gen 4 drive aimed at the consumer market segment. The Exceria Pro family is made up of just two capacities, 1TB and the flagship 2TB drive. The drive uses a combination of Kioxia's own BiCS5 112-layer 3D TLC NAND along with a Kioxia branded controller. Kioxia has kept details about the controller very close to their chest but an educated guess is that it's probably a re-branded Phison PS5018-E18.

The official maximum Sequential read/write performance figures for the 2TB Exceria Pro are up to 7,300MB/s and 6,400MB/s respectively. Using the ATTO benchmark we couldn’t quite hit either of these figures (6,860MB/s reads, 5,780MB/s write), but we could confirm the official read figure with the CrystalDiskMark benchmark. The best test read figure we saw was 7,417.26MB/s using CrystalDiskMark 8 (NVMe settings, default profile, compressible data). The best write result of 5,862MB/s, which is shy of the official maximum, came when the drive was tested with CrystalDiskMark's Peak Performance profile using compressible data.

When it came to 4K performance, we couldn't get close to the official maximum figures with our 4-threaded testing. The 2TB version of the Exceria Pro is rated as up to 800,000 IOPS with writes up to 1.3M IOPS. The best we saw from the drive was when tested with CrystalDisMark 8's Peak Performance Profile (0 fill), which produced a peak read figure of 646,906 IOPS while writes peaked at 540,875 IOPS.

The drive doesn't come with any form of heatsink, not even something as simple as a layer of copper under the label – which is a bit of an odd choice with a Gen 4 drive as they do get quite toasty. Indeed, during some of our more stressful testing, we did see some thermal throttling occurring but rather than seeing the performance drop off a cliff, it was more of a managed gradual reduction. Adding a 3rd party heatsink solution or using a motherboard's drive cooling solution should prevent this from happening.

We found the 2TB version of the Kioxia Exceria Pro for £374.33 (inc VAT) on ebuyer.com HERE.

Pros

• BiCS5 TLC NAND.
• Overall Performance.
• Endurance.

Cons

• Couldn't get close to the official 4K maximums under testing.
• Really needs some form of heatsink.
• Pricey.

KitGuru says: Kioxia's first consumer Gen4 SSD is very good. But, and it's pretty important but… it does run hot and given the price of it, the decision not to have any form of heatsink is an odd one, especially as we saw thermal throttling in some of our testing. As it stands the drive really needs the be installed under a motherboard cooling solution or a 3rd party heatsink to keep it happy.

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