Kioxia Exceria Pro 2 TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review 4

Kioxia Exceria Pro 2 TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review

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Introduction

Kioxia Logo

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.

Specifications: Kioxia Exceria Pro 2 TB SSD
Brand:Kioxia / Toshiba
Model:LSE10Z002TG8
Capacity:2000 GB (1863 GB usable)
48 GB additional overprovisioning
Controller: Toshiba TC58NC1210GSE-00-BB
Rebranded Phison E18
Flash:Toshiba 112-Layer 3D TLC BiCS5
TH58LKT2T45BA8H
DRAM:2 GB SKHynix DDR4-3200
H5ANAG6NCJR-XNC
Endurance:800 TBW
Form Factor:M.2 2280
Interface:PCIe Gen 4 x4, NVMe 1.3
Device ID:KIOXIA-EXCERIA PRO SSD
Firmware:EIFA10.1
Warranty:Five years
Price at Time
of Review:
$280 / $140 per TB

Packaging

Package Front
Package Back


The Drive

SSD Front
SSD Back

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

SSD Interface Connector

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.

SSD Teardown PCB Front
SSD Teardown PCB Back

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

SSD Controller

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.

SSD Flash Chips

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

SSD DRAM Chip

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

Test Setup

Test System SSD 2021
Processor:AMD Ryzen 3 3300X @ 4.3 GHz
Zen 2, 16 MB Cache
Motherboard:ASUS Prime X570-Pro
BIOS 2606 / AGESA 1.0.8.0
Memory:Zadak Spark RGB, 16 GB DDR4
@ 3200 MHz 16-18-18-38
Graphics:EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO 6 GB
Power Supply:Thermaltake
Toughpower GF1 Snow 750 W
Case:DarkFlash DLX22
Operating System: Windows 10 Professional 64-bit
Version 2004 (May 2020 Update)
Drivers:AMD Chipset: 2.07.14.327
NVIDIA: 452.06 WHQL



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Apr 10th, 2025 01:37 EDT change timezone

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