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.



In this review, we will cover the Kioxia Exceria SATA, which is a refreshing change from all the M.2 NVMe SSDs that we've been reviewing. While these high-performance drives are all the rage today, there's still many scenarios where a classic 2.5" SATA drive will do—when upgrading an older computer and replacing the mechanical HDD in the process, for example. The number of M.2 slots is also fairly limited on most motherboards, so if you want to expand your storage, you might have to go SATA, too. Most motherboards support at least four SATA drives, often six or more, which makes this the connection of choice for large storage setups.

Internally, the Kioxia Exceria SATA uses a rebranded Phison S11 controller paired with aging 64-layer 3D TLC flash from Toshiba. A DRAM cache is not available, the NVMe Host Memory Buffer feature is also not supported.

The Kioxia Exceria SATA comes in capacities of 240 GB ($30), 480 GB ($40), and 960 GB ($80). Endurance for these models is set to 60 TBW, 120 TBW and 240 TBW respectively. Kioxia provides a three-year warranty for the Exceria SATA.

Packaging

The Drive

The drive conforms to the dimensions set forth by the 2.5" form factor. It is made out of plastic and only 7 mm thick, which makes it compatible with Intel's Ultrabook specification.


The Kioxia Exceria SATA uses the SATA 6 Gbps interface. It is compatible with any older SATA standard, but will in such a case work at reduced performance.


On the PCB, you'll find the controller and four flash chips, a DRAM cache chip is not available.


The Exceria uses a screw-less clamshell construction with a thermal pad installed to keep the controller cool.

Chip Component Analysis

The Toshiba TC58NC1010GSB controller is actually a rebranded Phison S11, which has a single core and two NAND flash channels. It's fabricated on a 40 nm process and has support for pseudo-SLC caching. Kioxia did not confirm or deny whether this is a Phison controller.


The four flash chips are Toshiba 64-layer 3D TLC NAND. Each chip has a capacity of 256 GB.