KIOXIA Exceria Pro NVMe 2TB M.2 SSD Review

There's no shortage of incredibly fast SSDs in today's market, but there's certainly always room for a few more! The new KIOXIA drives are here at last, and with the latest PCIe Gen4 x4 and NVMe 1.4 technology, they're promising to be exceptionally fast! Of course, most Gen4 drives are blisteringly fast, but the big differences come from the configuration of the components, their quality, and how they use the bandwidth available. KIOXIA says this drive can do up to 7300 MB/s read, which certainly puts it in the high-end. However, it can also do up to 6400 MB/s write, which is quite a bit faster than some of their rivals. KIOXIA Exceria Pro NVMe SSD The Exceria Pro is designed for professional users, so it's targeting the high-end PC market, gamers, content creators, and more. They operate a four-tier system for their SSDs, with Upgrader, Mainstream, Enthusiast, and Professional, and the Exceria Pro sits right at the top. It's the most common M.2 Type 2280 form factor too, so it's going to be broadly compatible with most modern motherboards, laptops, and systems. Of course, just make sure you have a Gen 4 PCIe slot if you want to hit those top speeds though. I have high expectations though, given KIOXIA hail from Toshiba, but the new memory division name is just a few years old, so it may not be familiar to you. However, given the company practically invented flash memory, they should know how a thing or two about SSDs! All their flash memory is manufactured in-house in Japan. Features Available in 1TB or 2TB7300MB/s Read, 6400 MB/s Write800000 IOPS Read, 1300000 IOPS WriteBiCS FLASHNVMe 1.4 TechnologyM.2 2280 Form FactorPCIe Gen4 x4SSD Utility Management Software400 TBW (1TB) and 800 TBW (2TB) with 1.5m Hours MTTF What KIOXIA Had to Say "The all-new KIOXIA EXCERIA PRO SSD Series uses next-generation technology to take your high-end computing and gaming into a new realm of possibilities. Leveraging PCI Express 4.0 technology, this updated professional-class SSD series now offers up to 2TB of capacity well-suited for both high-performance desktops and notebooks needing maximum speed. Imagine up to 7,300 MB/s of sequential read speed(1) and up to 6,400 MB/s sequential write speed(1), and you have the KIOXIA EXCERIA PRO Series. Designed to reduce game loading, video editing and graphic rendering time, the EXCERIA PRO Series helps your content creation or gaming environment excel." - KIOXIA Packaging & Accessories One thing I love about this SSD is the size of the box, as it's super compact. Given M.2 drives are so tiny to begin with, it never makes sense to see them in larger boxes. The box may be small, but it feels robust, and as you can see, it's got a nice photo and all the main details clearly displayed. Around the back, a quick breakdown of the warranty, and a few barcodes but nothing complicated really. We can also see it uses BiCS Flash, which is KIOXIA's own in-house hardware. The tiny box is easier to store, and less to recycle, but it does feel like it's doing a great job of protecting the drive too. The drive is mounted securely on the internal tray, and it's ready to just plug and play into your system. 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. Preparation The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn’t used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. Data We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various fillage scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. The drive will be tested empty and at 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage for this area. We're using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark for this part of the review. Application and Gaming Besides the synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with PCMark 10’s storage benchmark to get real-world performance results for various gaming and application usages. Drive Conditioning Durability is a vital factor in NAND-based drives as the chips can only be rewritten so often before they’ll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. Where appropriate, we will test this using Anvil’s Storage Utilities. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order. Hardware ASRock X570 ProMAMD 3700XGeForce RTX 2080Crucial Sport 4 x 8GB 3200MHz DDR4be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 (1200W)Noctua NH-U15S Software Anvil's Storage UtilitiesAS SSD BenchmarkATTO BenchmarkCrystalDiskMarkPCMark 10 Storage BenchmarkWindows 11 64 bit Anvil's Storage Benchmark Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a complete benchmark solution used to test any writeable storage drive. AS SSD Storage Benchmark The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD, and they aren’t using the operating system cache. The copy tests are cached and as such not viable results at this time. ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD and SSD benchmark utility that allows you to measure a drive’s sequential and random performance. All results are MB/s, and higher is better. How Much Does it Cost? Looking around the internet, it does seem like these KIOXIA drives are priced more on the premium side of things. With the 2TB Plus model priced around £250, and the flagship Pro series that I've been testing is a little over £300. That's certainly not cheap, but considering the read and more interestingly the write speeds exceed many of their rivals, I think it's justified. If you want faster, it costs more, and when it comes to performance, that metric couldn't be any simpler. It's about the same price as the flagship Samsung drives but has that beat when it comes to write performance, so while it may be expensive, the price and performance are certainly competitive in the enthusiast market. Overview This is likely a lot more SSD than your typical consumer would need. If you're using your PC for a bit of document editing, emailing, trolling on reddit and watching YouTube, you don't need this SSD. Even your average PC gamer likely doesn't need to spend this much, with something from their Plus series more than suitable for faster loading of even the biggest AAA gaming titles. However, if you really care about having the absolute best performance from every aspect of your system, then having one of the fastest consumer drives on the market today is going to be a big advantage. Content creators can benefit from the extremely fast read and write speeds, being able to load huge data sets of images and videos, having fast scratch discs while editing, and being able to render files much faster. Time is money, right? So investing in a fast SSD to speed up your workflow certainly makes sense. For gaming, wow is this drive fast. Sure, the write speeds aren't really much beyond quick save becoming a hell of a lot quicker. However, just little things like playing Elder Scrolls Online, I was porting into dungeons a hell of a lot faster than my teammates today. This is about as fast as a consumer drive gets these days, so just saying it's quick is a bit of an understatement, but you certainly get the idea. I was a little worried that the drive didn't come with a heatsink or anything else really. However, it doesn't really need to. Given this is going to target the enthusiast and professional markets, it's almost certain that it'll be going into a system or motherboard that has some form of heatsink built-in. How many high-end Gen 4 motherboards don't have a heatsink on the main M.2 slot these days? Even if you did buy something to add-on, and M.2 heatsink is like £9 these days, so it's easily dealt with. Should I Buy One? Overall, I really can't fault this drive. I haven't played with many KIOXIA drives in recent years, however, it's clear that their BiCS flash memory is more than up to the job. They promised some of the fastest read and write speeds that PCIe Gen 4 can deliver, and after benchmarking over and over, it didn't falter once. If you're looking for a fast and durable SSD from one of the most respected and experienced storage brands in the world, the KIOXIA Exceria Pro is what you'll find.