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


On the PCB you'll find the controller, one DRAM chip and two flash chips. Everything sits on the front side—the back of the card is completely clean, which makes this a single-sided drive, with maximum compatibility, even at 4 TB.


Kioxia's label has a copper-colored component on the back, but it doesn't look like the typical heat spreader copper. Usually those have some noticeable thickness, whereas here there is no added thickness at all; it doesn't feel metallic either, and bends very easily.

Chip Component Analysis

The Silicon Motion Technology SM2508 controller is the company's first PCI-Express 5.0 controller for consumer applications. It supports PCIe 5.0 x4 and runs with eight flash channels at 3600 MT/s. SMI fabricates the controller using a 6 nanometer process at TSMC Taiwan.


The two flash chips are Kioxia BiCS8 3D TLC NAND with 218 layers, marked TH58LKT4X48BAEG. Each chip has a capacity of 2 TB.


The DRAM chip is a 4 GB SK hynix LPDDR4X-4266 module. That's the classic 1 GB of DRAM per 1 TB of flash ratio, which gives the controller plenty of room to hold the mapping tables in memory, so it never has to go looking for address translations on the flash itself.