Introduction

The Kioxia brand was established around 2018/2019, after Toshiba sold off its SSD and memory branch "Toshiba Memory." The company now produces flash memory for its own products, but also WD and SanDisk. Part of the original Toshiba SSD business was formed in 2014, when Toshiba bought the famous OCZ brand. Recently, Kioxia also acquired the SSD maker Lite-On.



Today, we have for review the Kioxia Exceria 1 TB, which is the company's value-oriented M.2 NVMe solid-state drive. It is based on the eight-channel TC58NC1202GST controller, which is a customized version of the Phison PS5012-E12C, paired with Toshiba 96-layer 3D NAND flash. E12C is a lower-cost variant of the E12, with four flash channels instead of eight. A DDR4-2666 DRAM chip provides 1 GB of memory for the mapping tables of the SSD.

The Kioxia Exceria comes in capacities of 250 GB ($40), 500 GB ($55), and 1 TB ($85). Endurance for these models is set to 100 TBW, 200 TBW, and 400 TBW respectively. Kioxia includes a five-year warranty with the Exceria SSD.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


Like most M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Kioxia Exceria connects to the host system over a PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and one DRAM chip.

Chip Component Analysis

Kioxia has licensed the Phison E12C controller and rebranded it. Unlike the E12 and E12S, the E12C is a four-channel design. Like the other E12 models, it has support for TLC and NVMe 1.3c.


The four flash chips are 96-layer 3D TLC NAND made by Kioxia/Toshiba.


A Samsung DDR4-2666 chip provides 1 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.

Test Setup