Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 2TB SSD Review: A safe but unexceptional drive

The Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 is a solid all-around SSD. Kioxia is probably best known for its OEM and enterprise drives, and to some extent, its Exceria line of consumer drives has flown under the radar. This is a misjustice because these drives have a solid reputation for reliability, with generally few downsides with the hardware. Performance and power efficiency are acceptable to good, and there’s no unusual switching of the type of flash, unlike what we see with some other vendors. You can pick up one of these, including the Plus G4, and expect a straightforward experience. What’s not to love?

If there’s a cost for this experience, it’s probably found in the limited capacity range, middle-of-the-road performance, and, to some extent, availability and pricing concerns. This isn’t the drive for maximum performance or power efficiency; it’s not going to solve your needs for a super small drive or a large drive, and it might not always be a sensible option economically. But there are sales, and perhaps more importantly, some regions of the world have fewer reliable drive choices, and Kioxia’s Exceria drives might be more competitive. The Plus G4, in particular, also demonstrates what’s good about this class of drives – they can be used for any purpose while delivering a decent experience.

This makes it a safe drive to pick up if you’re just trying to put the last-minute final touches on a build. Maybe you’re not sure what to get, or maybe this drive catches your eye on a sale. Whatever the case, its greatest strength is that you can buy it without worry. Peace of mind is a value of its own. Kioxia’s SSDs are not fancy, and that, in our opinion, is to their benefit. We believe Crucial has a stronger hold in this market segment with the P510, but the Plus G4 is a good alternative, and it surpasses the P510 in enough areas to remain competitive.

Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 Specifications

The Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 is only available in 1TB and 2TB capacities, which might sound crazy to some. There is a market for smaller drives, especially 512GB, and larger drives of 4TB or more. However, the statistics don’t lie – 1TB and 2TB remain the most popular capacities, and these provide plenty of space for most people. Crucial’s P510 has the same capacities on offer for good reason. The Exceria Plus G4 directly competes with that drive, so we can’t act too surprised by this turn of events. With costs getting tighter in the NAND flash and SSD storage markets, it’s safer to focus on high-volume SKUs.

Currently, the Exceria Plus G4, or Plus G4 for short, sells at $142.99 and $209.99 on Amazon. This is way too high for the 1TB, and the 2TB is more expensive than the competition, including the P510. However, the Plus G4 is likely to be more widely available in other regions and probably at a more competitive price. The drive has modest performance levels of up to 10,000 / 8,200 MB/s for sequential reads and writes with up to 1,300 K / 1,400K random read and write IOPS. The warranty is standard at five years, with up to 600TB of write endurance per TB of capacity

Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 Software and Accessories

Kioxia offers its SSD Utility management software for its SSDs. This is an SSD toolbox that gives a health summary of the drive and also lets you monitor the SSD in real time. The application also helps with firmware updates, password protection, and enables functions such as secure erase. The program works for Windows 10 and up, and it works on all of Kioxia’s recent SSDs.

It’s nice to see such software being offered for what are essentially client or OEM drives, but Kioxia has been pushing deeper into the retail space with its Plus line of drives. Most users are on Windows, and the software covers the most common functions, so it’s a respectable attempt.

Kioxia Exceria Plus G4: A Closer Look

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Even without removing the top label, which Kioxia states does help spread and dissipate heat, we can tell this is a Phison drive from the power management IC (PMIC). The label states it’s a PCIe 5.0 drive, so that narrows things down considerably.

This is a single-sided drive at all capacities, so the back has no components. The drive lists its Physical Security ID (PSID), which means this drive supports TCG Opal. Phison controllers can and do support hardware encryption, but that feature likely adds to the manufacturer’s cost, which is why many brands omit SED support. It’s more common as at least an option on client and OEM drives due to business requirements, although typically you will have two separate SKUs for it, as is common with Micron drives.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The Plus G4 uses Phison’s E31T controller. For more details, see our E31T preview. For a brief reminder of the specifications: this is a four-channel DRAM-less PCIe 5.0 solution that can support an I/O rate up to 3,600 MT/s per NAND channel. 3,600 MT/s can be assumed to be 3,600 MB/s as consumer NAND flash transfers 8 bits, or one byte, at a time. There is overhead on these transfers, so the maximum bandwidth will be less than the channel count times this number. In this case, Phison rates the E31T for up to 10,600 MB/s. Eventually, these drives will be surpassed by 4,800 MT/s capable controllers and flash.

With four chip enable (CE) signals per channel, this drive can normally handle up to 32 dies without a problem, which is 4TB with current flash, although 2Tb dies would bump this up to 8TB. This is unlikely to ever happen, and for the most part, we’ve really only seen drives up to 2TB with this controller. This is something that frustrates the storage community, who see no reason for 4TB not to be commonplace. The reality is that it’s not cost-effective to run fast flash at that capacity when most of the market is selling smaller drives. 4TB drives can be found in other segments – on higher-end drives or with YMTC flash – and sticking to 2TB or less streamlines the production process for the third-party vendors. Flash availability is also a direct influence here, as QLC is in high demand in the enterprise.

Kioxia has an easier time with that since it manufactures its own flash. The NAND flash packages here are labeled TH58LKT3T488A8S, which are still using the old Toshiba coding. We already know these are 1TB packages with eight 1Tb dies each, using 218-Layer BiCS8 TLC flash. We’ve only had good results with this flash – see the Sandisk WD_Black SN8100 – and it’s proven to be power-efficient with low 4K latency. Combined with Kioxia’s usually reliable custom firmware, we expect only good things.

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