We reviewed the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2 last month, which is the company's flagship M.2 NVMe SSD. Today, we have its little brother, just called "Exceria." Toshiba wrote "TC58NC1202GST" on the controller's casing, but it really seems to be a rebranded Phison E12C—a highly popular controller with a proven track record. Kioxia has probably made some firmware tweaks, but there's no way to know for sure. A DRAM cache is also included for the mapping tables of the SSD, which helps with random writes.

Synthetic numbers of the Kioxia Exceria pretty much confirm its positioning, not much to report here. What may be worth pointing out is that sequential writes are a little bit on the weak side, reaching roughly 1.6 GB/s, which of course is a lot, but considerably less than many competing PCIe Gen 3 SSDs, which reach well above 2 GB/s in the same test.

Results in our real-life test suite are very impressive on the other hand, especially considering the drive's pricing. Here, the Exceria is really close to the Exceria Plus G2. The only major differences can be seen where large sequential writes are needed—here, the Exceria Plus G2 can pull ahead. In all other tests, especially read-heavy ones, there's virtually no difference. The Exceria easily beats the performance of all "value" drives in our test group: Sabrent Rocket Q, ADATA Falcon & Swordfish, Crucial P1, HP EX900, WD Blue, Corsair MP400, Kingston A2000, Samsung 970 EVO, and Team Group MP34 are all slower than the Kioxia SSD. More premium PCIe Gen 3 drives are faster, of course; as an example, the Kingston KC2000 is 5% ahead, just like the Kioxia Exceria Plus G2. The ADATA SX8200 Pro and Samsung 980 non-Pro are 6% faster. The SK Hynix Gold P31, the fastest Gen 3 drive we ever tested, offers 8% extra performance at twice the price. The best Gen 4 SSDs, which are much more expensive, are up to 11% faster, with bigger differences in specific tests, which only makes sense if you have the money to spend and the workloads to benefit from, but if you're looking for best price/performance then nothing can beat the Kioxia Exceria right now—it leads our Performance per Dollar chart by quite a significant margin.

My biggest issue with the Kioxia Exceria is its tiny pseudo-SLC cache of just 19 GB, which is very small by today's standards. Competing drives offer MUCH bigger caches, several hundred GB is not uncommon, which gives those drives the ability to soak up larger write bursts. We do test our real-life benchmarks at 80% disk full, so the SLC cache size is already taken into account for our real-life performance results, which are very good indeed. Still, I feel like a larger cache would have been an easy way to achieve better performance characteristics. Filling the drive completes at around 700 MB/s, which is a decent result for a value d and comparable to competing SSDs. Of course, momentarily stopping the write activity will have the SLC cache free up capacity immediately, so full write rates are available as soon as you give the drive a moment to settle down.

Unlike some other M.2 NVMe SSDs, the Kioxia Exceria doesn't come with a heatsink preinstalled, and it doesn't need one either. In our thermal stress test, we saw no thermal throttling. This is possible because the write rates of the Exceria are lower than on other SSDs: 1.5 GB/s vs. 2.5 GB/s, so the controller doesn't put out as much heat. What also helps a lot is that Kioxia picked a very high thermal limit. We measured a surface temperature of 104°C during our test, and the drive still didn't throttle. What's noteworthy here is that the drive's own temperature reporting claimed a temperature of 72°C at the same time—typical for some Phison controllers, but not a real issue.

Kioxia isn't selling their consumer SSDs in the States anymore—the website states that "As of October 1, 2019, Toshiba Memory is now KIOXIA. Unfortunately, our lineup of consumer flash and storage products are no longer available in the United States, but we will continue to offer support for Toshiba Memory and OCZ SSDs." Toshiba and OCZ had a very global footprint, and some of the same key people are still around at Kioxia, so the global sales expertise should still be there. Maybe, there's some sort of non-compete agreement between Kioxia and Western Digital, who's one of the largest NAND customers of Toshiba, and there are additional collaborations between both companies. In Europe, the Exceria is readily available from all the big stores and priced extremely competitive at €80 including VAT. For a 1 TB SSD, that's an awesome price, which makes it one of the most affordable drives on the market at this time. We converted the price to US$85 for the purpose of the comparisons in this review. Strong competitors are the Kingston A2000, ADATA SX6000 Pro, Kingston A2000, and Crucial P1 and P2—depending on pricing. If you are willing to spend a bit more. you could consider the ADATA SX8200 Pro ($100), HP EX950 ($105), Samsung 980 ($115), and maybe Kingston KC2500 ($125), which all are a bit faster, but don't offer nearly as good a price/performance ratio as the Kioxia Exceria SSD. I only wish Kioxia offered the Exceria in larger capacities than 1 TB as people are now starting to consider 2 TB SSDs more and more often.