A Closer Look
The KIOXIA Exceria Pro looks great, not that you typically see your M.2 drives once they’re installed in your system. It’s a fairly bare-looking setup though, with just a sticker over the chips, but that’s not exactly uncommon either.
Personally, my M.2 slots have heatsinks built into them courtesy of my motherboard, so they provide additional cooling to ensure performance. With that in mind, this type of drive is ideal for me. However, if you did want to add your own aftermarket cooler or heatsink, that should be easy enough, as this is a very common M.2 2280 form factor drive.
The Exceria uses the latest BiCS TLC 3D Flash Memory, and with memory on one side of the PCB for the 2TB, I would assume it’ll be just one side for the smaller 1TB model. However, perhaps this means there’s (literally) room for a 4TB model in the future.
It’s honestly a pretty straightforward setup, and while KIOXIA doesn’t list a controller or cache details in their specifications, it’s no doubt all KIOXIA hardware throughout anyway, as that’s what they do! So long as it can hit those impressive quoted read and write speeds, I’m happy.
The drive is designed for the enthusiast market though, and it sounds like it can take quite a bit of punishment throughout its life. It’ll operate from 0 °C (Ta) to 85 °C (Tc), but can be stored in -40 °C to 85 °C. It’s got 800TB TBW, and a 1.5 million hours MTTF. So even the more demanding usage scenarios shouldn’t be an issue here.
