Introduction

The Kioxia brand was established around 2018/2019, after Toshiba sold its SSD and memory branch "Toshiba Memory." The company now produces flash memory for its own products, but also WD and SanDisk. Part of the original Toshiba SSD business was formed in 2014, when Toshiba bought the famous OCZ brand. Recently, Kioxia also acquired the SSD maker Lite-On. Unfortunately, Kioxia SSD products are not available in the United States.



Kioxia has always been an interesting SSD vendor. Recently, they impressed us with the highly cost-effective Exceria SSD, but they've lacked a high-end PCI-Express 4.0 offering. With the Kioxia Exceria Pro this finally changes. Kioxia's newest SSD is based on the famous Phison E18 controller we're seeing on the vast majority of today's high-end PCI-Express 4.0 SSDs. While most of these drives use either 96-layer or 176-layer TLC flash from Micron, Kioxia is using their own 112-layer BiCS5 TLC NAND flash. It will be interesting to see how the different flash performs. Also included is 2 GB of DRAM cache for those random writes.

The Kioxia Exceria Pro comes in capacities of 1 TB (€149 including VAT) and 2 TB (€299 including VAT). We converted the €299 price tag to $280 (without tax) for the comparisons in this review. Endurance for these models is set to 400 TBW and 800 TBW respectively. Kioxia includes a five-year warranty with the Exceria Pro.