Packaging

The Drive

The drive uses the M.2 2280 form factor, which makes it 22 mm wide and 80 mm long.


While most other M.2 NVMe SSDs transfer data over the PCI-Express 3.0 x4 interface, the Kioxia Exceria Pro connects to the host system using a PCI-Express 4.0 x4 interface, which doubles the theoretical bandwidth.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller, four flash chips, and a DRAM cache chip. The other side of the PCB is empty.

Chip Component Analysis

Toshiba is using a rebranded Phison PS5018-E18 controller. The E18 is Phison's PCI-Express 4.0 flagship with eight channels. It is produced on TSMC's 12 nanometer node and uses five Arm Cortex R5 CPU cores. The E18 supports NVMe 1.4, TLC, DDR4 memory, and up to 32 dies.

Kioxia neither confirms nor denies the use of the Phison E18, we verified the use of Phison's controller independently.


The four flash chips are Kioxia/Toshiba 112-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 2 TB.


One Hynix DDR4-3200 chip provides 2 GB of fast DRAM storage for the controller to store the mapping tables.