The Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 is the company's latest enthusiast M.2 NVMe SSD. It is based on 96-layer 3D TLC NAND flash from Toshiba, paired with an eight-channel SSD controller from Toshiba. Actually, the controller is made by Phison; it's their E12S controller, which we've seen on several other SSDs before. I'm sure there's some firmware secret sauce in the Exceria Plus G2 because performance is excellent. A DRAM cache is also included for the mapping tables of the SSD, to help with random writes.

Synthetic numbers of the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 are very good, especially write performance, both random and sequential, is very impressive and among the best we've ever seen from a PCIe Gen 3 SSD. Random IO is slightly weaker than expected as the drive can only compete with midrange NVMe SSDs.

Good that we have our real-life test suite, too, which runs the actual applications, not a purely synthetic workload controllers are optimized for. We also test at 80% drive full capacity, which puts additional stress on the controller, SLC cache, and DRAM mapping table algorithms. Here, the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 delivers very good results, matching those of famous drives like the HP EX950, ADATA SX8200 Pro, and Kingston KC2000. The only PCIe 3 TLC SSD that's faster is the Hynix Gold P31. PCI-Express 4.0 promises twice the transfer rates, but such gains are rarely achieved in real life because nearly no application transfer nothing but huge chunks of sequential data. The best Gen 4 SSDs, which are much more expensive, are up to 6% faster, with bigger differences in specific workloads, which makes justifying the price increase difficult. On the other hand, if the majority of your tasks are sequential transfers, going PCIe Gen 4 can definitely make sense.

Sequential write performance of the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 is excellent, better than most competing drives. Filling the whole 2 TB capacity completed at 1.4 GB/s, which is one of the best PCIe Gen 3 TLC SSD results we have every seen. With 40 GB, the pseudo-SLC cache is very small by today's standards, though. Competing drives offer MUCH bigger caches, several hundred GB is not uncommon, which gives those drives the ability to soak up larger write bursts. As mentioned before, we're testing our real-life benchmarks at 80% disk full, so the SLC cache size is already taken into account for our real-life performance results, which are very good indeed. Of course, momentarily stopping the write activity will have the SLC cache free up capacity immediately, so full write rates are available as soon as you give the drive a moment to settle down.

Unlike some other high-end M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 doesn't come with a heatsink preinstalled. In our thermal stress test, we saw only minimal throttling, so I wouldn't worry much about it. What I'd also like to praise Kioxia for is that their thermal throttling is very well behaved. While performance of some other drives falls off a cliff as soon as they get too hot, the Exceria Plus G2 will gradually reduce write rates to keep thermals at safe levels.

Kioxia isn't selling their consumer SSDs in the States anymore—the website states that "As of October 1, 2019, Toshiba Memory is now KIOXIA. Unfortunately, our lineup of consumer flash and storage products are no longer available in the United States, but we will continue to offer support for Toshiba Memory and OCZ SSDs." Toshiba and OCZ had a very global footprint, and some of the same key people are still around at Kioxia, so the global sales expertise should still be there. Maybe, there's some sort of non-compete agreement between Kioxia and Western Digital, who's one of the largest NAND customers of Toshiba, and there are additional collaborations between both companies. In Europe, the Exceria Plus G2 is readily available from all the big stores, priced at around €270 including 20% VAT. Converted to USD, this brings the price to around $270, which is quite competitive. You should definitely put the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 on your list if you're looking for a high-performance M.2 NVMe SSD that doesn't break the bank. Strong competitors are the ADATA SX8200 Pro ($260), Kingston KC2500 ($280), HP EX950 ($250), and, of course, Hynix Gold P31 ($270). The performance offered is pretty close to PCIe Gen 4 drives, which are much more expensive; Samsung 980 Pro: $375, WD Black SN850: $390, Corsair MP600 Pro: $360, Crucial P5 Plus: $370. If you only care about price/performance and are happy to sacrifice some performance for better pricing, entry-level value M.2 NVMe SSDs could be an option as those retail at around $200 and below and are not that much slower.