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The latest drive from Kioxia is the Exceria PRO G2, the new flagship model for the company's consumer range. The Gen 5 drive, which uses a combination of an 8-channel controller and 218-layer NAND, is Kioxia's fastest drive to date, rated up to 14,900MB/s and 13,700MB/s for sequential read and writes, respectively.
At the time of writing, the Exceria PRO G2 lineup consists of three capacities: 1TB, 2TB and the flagship 4TB model (the drive we are looking at here). At the heart of the drive is a Silicon Motion SM2508 8-channel controller paired up with Kioxia's BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC NAND.
Kioxia rates the Sequential performance of the 4TB Exceria PRO G2 as up to 14,900MB/s for reads and up to 13,700MB/s for writes. The 2TB drive gets the same read rating as the 4TB drive, while the 1TB is rated up to 14,400MB/s. When it comes to write performance, the 2TB drive is rated up to 13,400MB/s and up to 12,700MB/s for the 1TB model.
Random performance for the 4TB drive is quoted as up to 2,300,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,950,000 IOPS for writes. The 2TB drive is rated up to 2,250,000 IOPS and up to 1,950,000 IOPS for read and writes, respectively, while the 1TB gets 2,000,000 IOPS for reads and 1,900,000 IOPS for writes.
The 4TB drive gets a TBW endurance rating of 2,400TB, while the 2TB gets 1,200TB, and the 1TB gets 600TB.
Kioxia backs the drives with a 5-year warranty.
Physical Specifications:
- Usable Capacities: 4TB.
- NAND Components: BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC NAND.
- NAND Controller: Silicon Motion SM2508.
- Cache: LPDDR4.
- Interface: PCIe Gen 5 x4, NVMe 2.0d.
- Form Factor: M.2, 2280.
- Dimensions: 80.15 x 22.15 x 2.63mm.
Firmware Version: AZRA4103.
Kioxia's Exceria PRO 4TB comes in a compact box with the drive image on the front and a sticker displaying its capacity and sequential read speed (up to 14,900MB/s).
The rear of the box includes a description of the drive’s form factor, a small logo indicating it uses BiCS Flash, a PCIe 5.0 (NVMe 2.0d) interface, and a 5-year warranty.
The Exceria PRO G2 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.
As the drive is a single-sided format, all the components are on one side of the PCB. Alongside the Silicon Motion SM2508 controller sit two 2TB packages of Kioxia BiCS8, 218-layer 3D TLC NAND and a DRAM IC (SK Hynix H9HCNNNCPUML).
Silicon Motion's SM2508 is an 8-channel controller built on a 6nm process that offers a balance between high performance and low power usage. It uses a quad-core 32-bit Arm Cortex-R8 processor running at 1.25GHz in conjunction with a single 32-bit Cortex-M0. The eight NAND channels support 3D TLC/QLC NAND technologies at speeds of up to 3,600 MT/s.
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
ADATA Mars 980 Blade 2TB
Corsair MP700 PRO SE 4TB
Corsair MP700 PRO 2TB
Corsair MP700 PRO XT 2TB
Corsair MP700 Elite 2TB
Corsair MP700 Micro 4TB
Crucial T705 2TB
Crucial T700 2TB
Crucial T700 with Heatsink 2TB
Gigabyte AORUS 10000 2TB
Kingston Fury Renegade G5 2TB
Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 2TB
Klevv Genuine G360 2TB
Netac NV150HK 2TB
Samsung SSD 9100 PRO 2TB
Seagate FireCuda 520 2TB
Sandisk WD Black SN8100 2TB
Software:
Atto Disk Benchmark 5.
CrystalDiskMark 9.0.0.
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 behaviour query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active.
CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSDs. We are using v9.00 to test Gen 5 drives from now on.
Kioxia's Exceria Pro G2 does very well in the CrystalDiskMark 8 4K QD1 T1 test, with a read score of 101.28MB/s, the third fastest read score behind WD's Black SN8100 and Corsair's MP700 PRO XT drives. Its write result of 306.98MB/s is slower than the WD drive but faster than the Corsair.
As can be seen from the benchmarking result screens, using the default CrystalDiskMark test, the drive came up just a little short of the official maximums of 14,900MB/s for reads and up to 13,700MB/s for writes at 14,847MB/s and 13,681MB/s for reads and writes, respectively.
That read score of 14,847MB/s is good enough to place the drive into fourth place on the results chart.
Using the Peak Performance profile of CrystalDiskMark 9 with default settings, the 4K performance of the drive fell somewhat short of the official maximums of up to 2,300,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,950,000 IOPS for writes, with test results of 2,063,466 IOPS for reads and 1,836,028 IOPS for writes. It might have been short of the maximum figure, but the test read result is still good enough to put the drive into third spot in the results chart.
Once again, we could confirm the official Sequential figures with test results of up 14,817MB/s for reads and up to 13,732MB/s for writes, a little shy of the official maximums but certainly in the ballpark.
Using the Real World profile tests in CrystalDiskMark 9, the drive produced Sequential read / write results of 9,832MB/s and9,957MB/s, respectively, putting it into second place on the results chart.
The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage system's performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise your performance measurements, 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 5.0 for our NVMe disk tests with a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance. ATTO 5 has new features, enhancements and changes which allow it to benchmark modern SSDs more thoroughly than previous versions.
Using the ATTO benchmark, we could confirm the official sequential performance figures of up to 14,900MB/s and up to 13,700MB/s for reads and writes, respectively, with results of 14,930 MB/s for reads and 13,760MB/s for writes.
AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benchmarking 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 it is difficult to judge accurate performance figures.
In the AS-SSD benchmark, the 4TB Kioxia Exceria PRO G2 produced a read score of 5550, which puts it into sixth position in the results chart and is 2065 points better than the previous Gen5 Kioxia drive we looked at, the Exceria Plus G4, which uses the same 218-layer NAND, but with a 4-channel controller.
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 were shy of the official maximums of up to 14,900MB/s for reads and up to 13,700MB/s for writes, with results of 14,704MB/s and 13,619MB/s for reads and writes respectively.
128KB Sequential Read Performance v QD.
At QD 1, the drive sits in the bottom half of the table, but as the queue deepens, the drive moves up the chart, so by QD32 it sits in fifth place on the results chart.
128KB Sequential Write Performance v QD.
When it comes to the sequential write test results, the Kioxia Exceria PRO G2 sits in the penultimate place at QD1. However, as with the read test, as the queue depth deepens, the performance improves, pushing the drive up the chart so it finishes at QD32 in the fifth spot.
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 2,300,000 IOPS; the best we saw was 556,572 IOPS at QD32.
4K Random Read v QD Performance
The drive is consistent in its performance as the queue depth deepens, sitting in fifth or sixth place throughout the testing.
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 1,950,000 IOPS in the write test using our four-threaded tests. The best we saw was 474,063 IOPS at the end of the test at QD32.
4K Random Write v QD Performance
At QDs 1-4, the drive sits in the bottom half of the table, but at QD32 it has climbed into the top ten.
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 four threads, the drive produces 135,525 IOPS (555.11MB/s) at QD1 climbing to 695,133 IOPS (2,847MB/s) at QD32. Switching over to a single thread, the drives performance ranges from 36,180 IOPS (148MB/s) at QD1 up to 245,214 IOPS ( 1,004MB/s) at QD16 before dropping back to 237,499 IOPS (972MB/s) at QD32.
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 showed smooth increases in performance as the queue depth deepened, without any noticeable drama. The Kioxia Exceria PRO G2's QD1 performance ranged from 23,647 IOPS (96.86MB/s) with a single thread up to 94,547 IOPS (313.79MB/s) using four threads.
At QD8, the single-threaded performance had risen to 159,341 IOPS (652.66MB/s), while the four-threaded performance ended at 499,274 IOPS (1,808MB/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 8,449.12MB/s, well short of the official maximum figure of 14,900MB/s before dropping back to 7,888MB/s at QD32.
That 8,449.12MB/s result sees the drive in a lower mid-table position. It is 1,115MB/s faster than the previous Gen 5 Kioxia drive, the Exceria Plus G4, we've tested.
In the write throughput test, the drive peaked at 11,426.1MB/s at the 8MB block mark before dropping back a little to finish the test run at 11,397MB/s (QD16).
The drive with its 8-channel controller sits in a mid table position and is some 3,148MB/s faster than the previous Kioxia drive we tested, the Exceria Plus G4, which uses a 4-channel controller.
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 4TB Kioxia Exceria PRO G2 does a good enough job with PCMark10's Full System Drive Benchmark without being spectacular. It averaged 349MB/s for the six Adobe startup traces, the fastest being 413MB/s for the startup test trace of Premiere Pro, the slowest being the Lightroom startup trace at 262MB/s.
Switching to the five Adobe usage traces, it averaged 659MB/s for the five tests, including the 1,410MB/s figure for the Adobe Photoshop heavy usage trace.
When it came to the three gaming test traces, the drive averaged 1,164MB/s, with the fastest being Battlefield V at 1,532MB/s and the slowest, Overwatch, at 662MB/s. Call Of Duty Black Ops 4 was in the middle of these two at 1,299MB/s. Switching over to the file transfer tests, the drive averaged 3,509MB/s for the six tests, the fastest of which was the cp1 Write test at 6,083MB/s.
With an overall bandwidth score of 755.38MB/s, Kioxia's Exceria PRO 4TB drive sits in a mid table position.
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 PRO G2 produced an average game loading bandwidth figure for the three games of 1,316MB/s with an average access time of 40µs.
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 32.7µs.
The average bandwidth figure for the 4TB G2 for the complete benchmark run was 884.78MB/s, which puts the drive into third 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 PRO G2 handles the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker Official Benchmark pretty well, topping three of the load scenes but sitting in last place for the remaining two tests.
We took note of the drive’s temperature during some of our benchmarking runs. The Kioxia Exceria PRO G2 uses a Silicon Motion SM2508 8-channel controller, which has been designed to offer high performance with low power consumption, negating the need for the large heatsinks seen on the first batch of Gen 5 drives.
The Exceria PRO G2 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 36°C when the drive was running the CrystalDiskMark 8 Sequential QD1-32 T1 Write test. For the majority of the testing, the drive averaged 31°C, which, for a Gen5 drive is very impressive, while the 4K-based tests averaged out at 27°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 the drive reading from & writing to a 2TB Kingston KC3000.
Transfer Details
Data file – 100GB.
File folder – 50GB – 28,523 files.
Movie demos 8K – 21GB – (11 demos).
Raw Movie Clips 4K – 16GB – (9 MP4V files).
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 PRO G2 averaged 4,247MB/s when writing the 8 transfer tests, with the fastest being 7,076MB/s for the 4K Raw Movie Clips folder, with the 50GB file folder transfer being the slowest at 570MB/s.
Reading back the data, the average was 4,506MB/s, and this time around, it was the 5GB image transfer that was the fastest at 7,069MB/s and again, it was the 50GB file folder transfer that was the slowest at 1,207MB/s.
The latest drive to join Kioxia's Exceria range of SSDs is the Gen 5 Exceria PRO G2, the new flagship high-performance model. The new drive range comprises three drive capacities: 1TB, 2TB and the flagship 4TB model (the latter of which Kioxia supplied for review).
The Exceria PRO G2 uses a combination of a Silicon Motion SM2508 8-channel controller paired up with Kioxia's BiCS8 218-layer 3D TLC NAND. Silicon Motion's 8-channel SM2508 has been designed to offer high performance together with low power consumption, which helps reduce the problem that all Gen 5 drives have to deal with, namely heat production. The Kioxia Exceria PRO G2 doesn't have a heatsink, but it does have a layer of what looks like copper built into the product label to help disperse the heat.
Sequential performance for the 4TB PRO G2 is quoted as up to 14,900MB/s for reads and up to 13,700MB/s for writes. The 2TB drive is rated at up to 14,900MB/s for reads and up to 13,400MB/s for writes, while the 1TB drive gets up to 14,400MB/s and 12,700MB/s for reads and writes, respectively. When it comes to random 4K performance, the 4TB drive is quoted as up to 2,300,000 IOPS for reads and up to 1,950,000 IOPS for writes. The 2TB drive gets up to 2,250,000 IOPS and up to 1,950,000 IOPS for reads and writes, respectively, while the 1TB is rated at up to 2,000,000 IOPS for reads and 1,900,000 IOPS for writes.
Benchmarking the drive with the ATTO tool, we could confirm the rated 14,900MB/s maximum speed for the drive with a test result of 14,930MB/s with writes at 13,760MB/s, a tiny bit ahead of the official maximum of 13,700MB/s.
Officially, the 4TB drive is rated up to 1,300,000 IOPS and up to 1,400,000 IOPS, respectively, for 4K random reads/writes. With our four threaded tests, we could get nowhere near the official maximums, with the best test figures of 556,572 IOPS (QD32) for reads and 474,063 IOPS (QD32) for writes. Switching over to the Peak Performance profile settings in CrystalDiskMark 9, we still came up short on the official read/write figures but were much closer, with a default read score of 2,063,466 IOPS and writes at 1,836,028 IOPS.
The thermal controls for the drive work well, as the hottest the drive got during our test runs was 36°C when the drive was running the CrystalDiskMark 8 Sequential QD1-32 T1 Write test. For the majority of the testing, the drive averaged 31°C, while the 4K-based tests averaged out at 27°C. Both figures are very impressive for a Gen 5 drive.
We found the 4TB version of Kioxia's Exceria PRO G2 on Scan UK for £775.99 (inc VAT) HERE.
Pros
- Sequential performance.
- Runs pretty cool for a Gen5 drive.
Cons
- Disappointing write performance in some tests.
- Pricey.
KitGuru says: Kioxia's Exceria PRO G2, makes good use of the latest NAND and controller technologies as it is the company's fastest Gen 5 model to date. It offers 14,900MB/s and 13,700MB/s read/write speeds while running relatively cool.
