Introduction

The Kioxia brand was established around 2018/2019, after Toshiba sold 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. A while ago, Kioxia also acquired the SSD maker Lite-On. Unfortunately, Kioxia SSD products are not available in the United States.



Today we are taking a look at the Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 2 TB, which, as the name suggests is the third generation of the company's "Exceria Plus" solid-state drive. These SSDs are targeted at competitive price points, while still offering solid performance. The first-gen Exceria Plus was released in 2020, the G2 in 2021, both drives are built on 96-layer TLC NAND flash from Toshiba, paired with a PCI-Express 3.0 compatible Phison E12 controller. The G3 in this review uses the much newer Phison E21, with support for PCI-Express 4.0, and the NAND flash is 112-layer TLC from Kioxia/Toshiba. Unlike previous versions, there is no DRAM cache installed on the G3, which makes sense, because the omission brings costs down to ensure the competitive price point.

The Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 is available in capacities of 500 GB (unlisted), 1 TB (€70 / $70), and 2 TB (€120 / $120). Endurance for these models is set to 200 TBW, 400 TBW, and 800 TBW respectively. Kioxia includes a five-year warranty with the Exceria Plus G3.

Packaging

The Drive

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


PCI-Express 4.0 x4 is used as the host interface to the rest of the system, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth compared to PCIe 3.0 x4.


On the PCB you'll find the controller and four flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is not included.

Chip Component Analysis

The Phison PS5021-E21 is Phison's newest PCI-Express 4.0 controller. It's a cost-optimized model, with four flash channels and support for TLC and QLC NAND. Phison has designed the E21 for DRAM-less operation, and it supports the NVMe 1.4 protocol. The controller itself is fabricated using a 12 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The four flash chips are Kioxia/Toshiba 112-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 512 GB.

Test Setup

Synthetic Testing

• Tests are run with a 20-second-long warm-up time (result recording starts at second 21).
• Between each test, the drive is left idle for 60 seconds, to allow it to flush and reorganize its internal data.
• All write requests contain random, incompressible data.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen

Real-life Testing

• After initial configuration and installation, a disk image is created; it is used to test every drive.
• Automated updates are disabled for the OS and all programs. This ensures that—for every review—each drive uses the same settings, without interference from previous testing.
• Our disk image consumes around 700 GB—partitions are resized to fill all available space on the drive.
• All drives are filled with random data to 85% of their capacity. This is intentional, to run the drive in realistic operating conditions—nobody uses a nearly-empty SSD in their system. It also puts additional stress on the pseudo-SLC cache subsystem, because there is less free NAND space to work with.
• Partitions are aligned properly.
• Disk cache is flushed between all tests.
• In order to minimize random variation, each real-life performance test is run several times, with reboots between tests to minimize the impact of disk cache.
• All application benchmarks run the actual application and do not replay any disk traces.
• Our real-life testing data includes performance numbers for a typical high-performance HDD, using results from a Western Digital WD Black 1 TB 7200 RPM 3.5" SATA. HDDs are significantly slower than SSDs, which is why we're not putting the result in the chart, as that would break the scaling, making the SSDs indistinguishable in comparison. Instead, we've added the HDD performance numbers in the title of each test entry.
• During these tests, M.2 drives are tested with additional active fan-cooling, to ensure thermal throttling can't happen