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.
