Kioxia Exceria Pro 2 TB M.2 NVMe SSD Review

Memory (DDR4/DDR5) and Storage (SSD/NVMe) 366 Page 17 of 17 Published by

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Final Words & Conclusion

Final Words & Conclusion

Kioxia's Exceria Pro is the company's first high-end M.2 NVMe SSD with PCI-Express 4.0 capability. Paired with a rebranded Phison controller PS5018-E18-based device it just provides incredible performance. It really is fast, but not as fast as some of the many that compete at this level. Again let me reiterate, that Kioxia does not confirm the origin of the controller, but even the PCB layout seems to have been used from Phisons reference design. That said, in this conclusion, we are going to talk a little about relativity, though, as breaking that 7 GB/sec marker isn't necessarily going to make your gaming PC a lot faster, and that is a simple truth. The good news is that Kioxia is not charging exorbitant prices for this outstanding device. Yes, this 7 GB/sec NVMe SSD comes at a high price, but at roughly 15 cents per GB, I am not unhappy whatsoever. This is a high-performance SSD with TLC writing, ample of endurance, and a 5-year guarantee. You'd be hard-pressed not to like this product at that price, wouldn't you?


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Do we really need 7000MB/sec storage units?

Um no? This is a premium performance product, often synthetically measured, and you'd need serious workloads to get the best out of it. Your PC isn't going to boot faster as your OS is the bottleneck, your PC games might load a fraction of a second faster, your application load up just as quickly as an NVMe SSD with reads/writes in the 2 GB/sec marker. Guys, this is the honest truth. However, the same folk that purchases a GeForce RTX 3090 or Radeon RX 6900 XT combined with some sort Core i9 or Ryzen 9 series processor, it's for those guys where that last sniff of performance matters, whether that is realistic or not, I'll leave open to discussion.  In retrospect, however, we do have new technologies coming up like DirectStorage. This will allow the graphics card to load textures directly from the SSD bypassing the processor, freeing up processor cycles for other tasks, and speeding up texture load times. In this way, if they have a fast M.2 disk, they will be in the game in less than 5 seconds even on large maps, a negligible time compared to the loading times we are used to today. That technology will be released in the Windows 11 timeframe.

Endurance

Kioxia offers 400 TBW and 800 TBW (Terabytes Written) for each model, coupled with an MTBF of up to 1,600,000 Hours (Mean Time Between Failures). We talked so much about this in the past already, endurance, the number of times NAND cells can be written before they burst and shatter into small pieces (well, they just die and are mapped out, any data present on that cell is written to a healthy one). Bigger volume sizes mean more NAND cells; more NAND cells thus increase endurance. For the 2TB model, you'll get a rated 800 TBW; the 1 TB model marks 700 TB written. So how long does a 800 TWB storage unit last before NAND flash cells go the way of the dodo? Well, if you are a really extreme user, you might be writing 50 GB per day (normal users likely won't even write that per week), but based on that value, 50GB x 365days= 18.25 TB per year written. So that's over 43 years of usage, half that for the 1TB SSD. And again, writing 50 GB per day is a very enthusiastic value. 

Thermals

The controller is not fitted with a heatsink or thermal sticker, the controller as such gets incredibly hot, resulting in thermal throttling under an extreme workload. Keep this SSD under a motherboard or 3rd party heatsink, and this will not be an issue.

Performance

The Kioxia Exceria Pro is a very fast product. Overall read performance increases from 3GB to well over 6.5 GB/sec. However, trace testing revealed that performance was somewhat lower, and I'll have a guess as to why. The more NAND layers there are, it appears that access times become slower. We're talking milli-fractions of a second here. The earlier generation, having fewer stacks, clocked in at (at most) 41 microseconds. It's a pattern we've been observing a while now, the number increases as more additional layers are added; latency.

Concluding

The Kioxia Exceria Pro is an M.2 2280 NVMe SSD that utilizes Phison's fastest E18 controller (unconfirmed by Kioxia) with newer firmware and 112 -Layer TLC 3D NAND flash to support capacities of up to 4TB. The SSD is 80.4 x 24 x 10.7mm in size and features a PCIe Gen 4 NVMe interface for compatibility with PCs. There are two storage capacities available: 1TB and 2TB, both come with a 2GB cache. Realistically the biggest performance benefit is deriving from the new B47 series Phison firmware, but small file performance has greatly increased with the latest updates. We do believe you will not notice the real-world effect and difference between a 3GB/sec and a 7GB/sec SSD anytime soon, but DirectStorage is getting supported, and that's where it will matter. If an application loads in a fraction of a second, it will be quicker in that fraction of a second. Other than that somewhat personal remark, all lights are green, TLC, high endurance and warranty. Please do seat the SSD under a mobo-supplied heatsink. It's running extremely hot without it, with a heatsink which prevents thermal throttling. Of course, to get the best out of it, you'll need a PCIe Gen 4 infrastructure, and at the time of writing, that means a compatible Ryzen processor on, say, a B550 or X570 chipset-based platform. In March 2021, Intel will start with PCIe gen 4.0 support as well. The Exceria Pro 2 TB would cost €299 / $280 sans tax. The SSD is priced comparable to other high-end PCI-Express 4.0 drives at that price point, if not somewhat more. When the workloads match, the unit will make you shiver with performance, and when they are not, you will be limited to high-end NVMe performance (select workloads). NVMe protocol version 1.4; this SSD is one of the first to support the new NVMe 1.4 standard. You do not need to install any additional drivers; only ensure that your operating system is up to date. After that, install and format the SSD, and you're good to go. Kioxia warranties the storage unit for a period of five years / or the claimed TBW value. It's uncertain if you'll ever require this level of performance or perceive a real-world difference between generation 3.0 and generation 4.0 devices. The good news is that as performance improves, both the low-end and mainstream markets will evolve. Consider for a moment that 3 GB/sec NVMe SSDs are fast becoming the industry standard and are presently readily accessible. Keep in mind that this SSD needs a heatsink of some sort to prevent throttling. The temperatures will not damage the product itself but will lower performance as it needs a bit of cooling. Most motherboards have excellent heatsinks already available. If you desire it, this is an enticing deal supported by a recognized brand; it has exceptional performance, a nice warranty, and high-quality components with a big name behind it all.

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