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

Comparison Products

The Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 is directly positioned to compete with mid-range PCIe 5.0 SSDs, so we arranged our test pool accordingly. Some popular ones include the Corsair MP700 Elite, which uses the same hardware, and the Crucial P510, which has the same controller but Micron rather than Kioxia TLC flash. This performance line was once fulfilled by early E26-based drives like the Corsair MP700. Those have eight channels and DRAM, but older flash.

Higher-end options include the Sandisk WD_Black SN8100, which is the best of the best right now, and the Acer Predator GM9000, a drive that represents less expensive high-end options that cut cost by using older flash or, in the case of the Biwin Black Opal X570, no DRAM.

We are also comparing the three musketeers of high-end Gen 4 DRAM-less: the Maxio MAP1602-based Silicon Power US75, the Phison E27T-based Sabrent Rocket 4, and the SMI SM2268XT2-based Kingston NV3. The NV3 and US75 are known for hardware revisions but we want to cover all potential competitors. If you’re looking at a drive like the Plus G4, then there’s the sparkle of some money saved by dropping down to PCIe 4.0, especially given that you might be running your next drive at least temporarily at that speed.

Trace Testing — 3DMark Storage Benchmark

Built for gamers, 3DMark’s Storage Benchmark focuses on real-world gaming performance. Each round in this benchmark stresses storage based on gaming activities including loading games, saving progress, installing game files, and recording gameplay video streams. Future gaming benchmarks will be DirectStorage-inclusive and we also include notes about which drives may be future-proofed.

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Hey, the Plus G4 scores pretty well here! It edges out the Micron-fuelled P510 and lines up nicely with the MP700 Elite. The drive is performing exactly as expected, which, for games, is exceptional. High-end PCIe 5.0 drives are still better, but the Plus G4 is more than fast enough for a primary drive where you also keep all of your games. The only downside is that it only goes up to 2TB.

Trace Testing — PCMark 10 Storage Benchmark

PCMark 10 is a trace-based benchmark that uses a wide-ranging set of real-world traces from popular applications and everyday tasks to measure the performance of storage devices. The results are particularly useful when analyzing drives for their use as primary/boot storage devices and in work environments.

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The Plus G4 also has relatively good application performance, but here it is closer to the P510, and it falls behind the similarly equipped MP700 Elite. Why is this so? Well, PCMark is one of those benchmarks that we know some manufacturers have optimized for in firmware. This also goes the other way in that optimized firmware could hurt a drive in this benchmark.

Client drives, with one application being for use in standardized prebuilt PCs for small businesses, have different requirements than retail. Getting fully specced for Dell or HP is actually a long and potentially grueling process. Client drives usually have a tighter performance envelope based on thermals, and reliability is a higher priority. This is one reason Kioxia drives have proven to be more reliable than analogous retail drives, even with spotty controllers like the InnoGrit IG5236 on the XG8.

We’re pointing that out because a lot of the time, SSD buyers have a single priority in mind: reliability. This is a very difficult thing to quantify. Most of the time, it comes down to a battle of anecdotes. Well, Kioxia drives have a decent track record for reliability, and if a slight decrease in PCMark 10 performance isn’t concerning to you, then you should consider a drive like the Plus G4 if you’re weighing various options. Kioxia makes the flash on this drive, which gives them a leg up on understanding how to optimize for a consistent, reliable experience.

Console Testing — PlayStation 5 Transfers

The PlayStation 5 is capable of taking one additional PCIe 4.0 or faster SSD for extra game storage. While any 4.0 drive will technically work, Sony recommends drives that can deliver at least 5,500 MB/s of sequential read bandwidth for optimal performance. In our testing, PCIe 5.0 SSDs don’t bring much to the table and generally shouldn’t be used in the PS5, especially as they may require additional cooling. Check our Best PS5 SSDs article for more information.

Our testing utilizes the PS5’s internal storage test and manual read/write tests with over 192GB of data both from and to the internal storage. Throttling is prevented where possible to see how each drive operates under ideal conditions. While game load times should not deviate much from drive to drive, our results can indicate which drives may be more responsive in long-term use.

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We don’t see any reason to particularly recommend the Plus G4 for the PS5. It could be a good choice if you want something that might last a long time in a predictable role, but usually it’s better to go with something less expensive that has a full five-year warranty from a known name brand. If such a drive goes bad, you can often get an equivalent or superior replacement. In some regions, this is more difficult, and Kioxia drives can be a safer bet than alternatives with unknown hardware.

Transfer Rates — DiskBench

We use the DiskBench storage benchmarking tool to test file transfer performance with a custom, 50GB dataset. We write 31,227 files of various types, such as pictures, PDFs, and videos to the test drive, then make a copy of that data to a new folder, and follow up with a reading test of a newly-written 6.5GB zip file. This is a real world type workload that fits into the cache of most drives.

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The Plus G4 is back to scoring where it should be on our DiskBench copy test: above the P510 and close to the MP700 Elite. It should match the MP700 Elite, and instead, it’s a little behind, but this is expected. The Plus G4 may be optimized differently for sustained writes, which will impact its write performance in this test. Additionally, it has a different firmware revision than the one we tested on the Corsair. Also expected is the P510 falling even more behind, but this perhaps warrants more discussion.

Careful readers will recall that in our Crucial T710 review, we mentioned that the T710, with its six-plane Micron TLC flash, can actually be faster at the lowest 1TB capacity. Likewise, the P510 is rated higher for sequential writes at 1TB – with the same flash as the T710 – in comparison to the four-plane BiCS8 on the MP700 Elite and Plus G4. This means that bandwidth-hungry buyers should lean towards the P510 at 1TB, while BiCS8 is potentially better at 2TB. If you care less about throughput – and if so, why are you looking at a mid-range PCIe 5.0 drive? – then we have typically found BiCS8 to have better latency.

Synthetic Testing — ATTO / CrystalDiskMark

ATTO and CrystalDiskMark (CDM) are free and easy-to-use storage benchmarking tools that SSD vendors commonly use to assign performance specifications to their products. Both of these tools give us insight into how each device handles different file sizes and at different queue depths for both sequential and random workloads.

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The Plus G4 tracks closely with the MP700 Elite in ATTO, with a slight deviation at the largest block size for reads. These two drives are close to the P510 in writes, but they fall behind on reads starting at 256KiB. As all three are using the same controller, this is probably due to the difference in flash. If we had 1TB versions of these drives to compare, we could make a better guess as to why the drives perform this way. Most likely, it’s due to the plane count difference, as this can influence interleaving with superpages, probably explaining why the P510 dips at 128KiB as well.

This is reinforced to some extent by the sequential CDM results. QD1 sequential reads favor the P510, suggesting the higher plane count can be useful here. That lines up with our thoughts in the T710 review. As QD1 is a more realistic workload, going with Micron’s newest TLC flash has potential real-world advantages. This advantage disappears with queue depth. Also obvious here is that PCIe 4.0 drives have no chance of keeping up in bandwidth, and the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives are in a class of their own. The mid-range drives like the Plus G4 are still worth a look as they are less expensive and will perform well in a PCIe 4.0 M.2 slot if so required.

We then look at 4K random I/O performance with a specific emphasis on low queue depth latency. Yes, the ability of the Plus G4 to push over a million IOPS is incredible, but this class of drive is less likely to encounter such workloads. Luckily, the BiCS8 TLC flash does good work on this drive with top-notch 4K QD1 read and write latencies. It can’t match the Black SN8100, but it beats the rest. We’ve come to expect good things out of BiCS8 flash, and the Plus G4 doesn’t disappoint.

If you did need to use this drive for more powerful things, for AI or otherwise, it is certainly up to the task, but we’re not convinced it’s the best option for that.

Sustained Write Performance and Cache Recovery

Official write specifications are only part of the performance picture. Most SSDs implement a write cache, which is a fast area of pseudo-SLC (single-bit) programmed flash that absorbs incoming data. Sustained write speeds can suffer tremendously once the workload spills outside of the cache and into the "native" TLC (three-bit) or QLC (four-bit) flash. Performance can suffer even more if the drive is forced to fold, which is the process of migrating data out of the cache in order to free up space for further incoming data.

We use Iometer to hammer the SSD with sequential writes for 15 minutes to measure both the size of the write cache and performance after the cache is saturated. We also monitor cache recovery via multiple idle rounds. This process shows the performance of the drive in various states as well as the steady state write performance.

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The 2TB Plus G4 first writes in its fastest, single-bit mode at over 8.9 GB/s. This is a temporary mode designed to trade capacity for speed. The cache size will vary with how full the drive is, but when empty, as in our testing, the cache extends to over 435GB. When converting 3-bit TLC flash to this pSLC mode, you can have up to almost 700GB, so this cache is of a more moderate size.

Larger, full-drive caches are typical for low-end DRAM-less drives, while small caches are rarer. The P510 is an example of the latter, and such a scheme allows it to write more consistently, which is particularly good for external use in an enclosure or for certain workloads such as NAS caching. The Plus G4 takes the more common course of somewhere in between.

Once the Plus G4 fills the cache, it falls to a direct-to-TLC mode at 1.5 GB/s, which is a pretty good speed and matches the MP700 Elite’s steady state write speed. Both it and the MP700 Elite write in TLC for quite a while before finally hitting a folding state. This occurs when the drive is forced to wait for data to be moved over from the cache to the native flash before it can accept incoming writes. The drive can and will move some data over while in TLC mode, but depending on the cache size and drive speed, this may be unsustainable. Folding is an undesirable state as it’s slower with higher latency, which can also impact reads for mixed workloads.

Generally, any given drive is limited to the base speed of its native flash. This is why QLC flash inevitably gets very slow. The pSLC write state is so much faster than the QLC flash – and QLC can be just as fast as TLC in that mode with the same plane count – that the drive hits a wall more quickly and more drastically, especially as QLC is going from 4-bit to 1-bit instead of 3-bit to 1-bit. The relevance here is that the Plus G4 looks worse than the MP700 Elite in the long run in this test despite having the same flash, but that’s likely because the Plus G4 is optimized differently. Client and OEM drives aren’t designed for sustained writes and often have a tighter power-thermal envelope. The performance here in pSLC and TLC is perfectly consistent, though.

The one standout here is the P510, which, as we mentioned above, has a smaller cache. The TLC state is then fast in comparison to the Plus G4, but is actually slow in terms of what the drive can do – the P510 has no trouble recovering to 4 GB/s with enough writes. Take into consideration that it’s not realistic to write the entire drive and that interpolation can get messy when we do this level of writes, but the results still suggest that Crucial is being conservative with the P510. We previously pointed out that this might be intended to improve the “quality of service” that was an issue on the T500, or it could be hinting at future external drive products.

This type of write behavior would be perfect for an enclosure where bottlenecks don’t benefit much from pSLC anyway, and a consistent write speed is desirable. However, for desktop use and moving back to the drive under review, the Plus G4 is adequate for even fairly heavy use.

Power Consumption and Temperature

We use the Quarch HD Programmable Power Module to gain a deeper understanding of power characteristics. Idle power consumption is an important aspect to consider, especially if you're looking for a laptop upgrade as even the best ultrabooks can have mediocre stock storage. Desktops may be more performance-oriented with less support for power-saving features, so we show the worst-case.

Some SSDs can consume watts of power at idle while better-suited ones sip just milliwatts. Average workload power consumption and max consumption are two other aspects of power consumption but performance-per-watt, or efficiency, is more important. A drive might consume more power during any given workload, but accomplishing a task faster allows the drive to drop into an idle state more quickly, ultimately saving energy.

For temperature recording we currently poll the drive’s primary composite sensor during testing with a ~22°C ambient. Our testing is rigorous enough to heat the drive to a realistic ceiling temperature.

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The Plus G4 is quite efficient, more efficient than the P510 but less than the MP700 Elite. We already know from experience that BiCS8 flash is more efficient than Micron’s, with appropriate trade-offs, but the Plus G4 still falls behind the fastest BiCS8-based drives. This might again be due to optimization.

We would like to point out that among the E31T-based drives we’ve tested, some – specifically the P510 and PNY CS2150 – have custom firmware strings, while others, including the MP700 Elite and Plus G4, have utilized standard Phison versioning. That does not mean there is or isn’t a lack of custom implementation, not least because Sandisk and Kioxia BiCS8 actually do not perform the same in all cases. That sounds unusual, as the flash should be identical; however, there are performance differences on some Phison controllers, such as the E28, based on early reports.

Regardless of the specific reasons for any differences, while the Plus G4 is less efficient on paper and has some minor performance quirks, the result is a more reliable experience. Our temperature testing backs this up as we hit a maximum temperature of 51°C, which is more than 30°C below the throttling point. This is an excellent result, making this a fantastic drive for laptops and other hot or confined environments. This is sensible since client and OEM drives often need to survive in low-airflow cases and warmer ambients.

Test Bench and Testing Notes

We use an Alder Lake platform with most background applications such as indexing, Windows updates, and anti-virus disabled in the OS to reduce run-to-run variability. Each SSD is prefilled to 50% capacity and tested as a secondary device. Unless noted, we use active cooling for all SSDs.

Lexar NM1090 Pro Bottom Line

The Kioxia Exceria Plus G4 isn’t a drive we expected to be excited about, but Kioxia’s Exceria line has gained popularity, especially in non-U.S. regions, and the drives have at least a neutral reputation, and usually a positive one. Contrast this with the infamous problems that we see with some drives that have changing hardware, which includes not only going from TLC to QLC flash but also swaps to hotter or less reliable controllers, and the usual rumor mill of “broken” drives, like with the Phison E18 performance issue. Kioxia has effectively dodged all of this and has also managed to maintain respectable levels of performance and power efficiency.

That’s both a positive and a negative. The Plus G4 doesn’t stand out in any way, but its baseline characteristics are sufficient. We would like better availability and maybe a wider capacity range. However, for many markets, the Plus G4 could be a diamond in the rough, and we feel it’s worth covering this drive for that reason alone.

Pricing right now in the U.S. isn’t competitive, but at least we get to see where this drive falls against the competition, most notably the Crucial P510. You can get higher bandwidth, decent power efficiency, good all-around and sustained performance, and reasonable pricing at the most popular capacities. You can’t go wrong buying any of these drives, including the Plus G4, and that's a good thing.

If you want something less expensive, there are plenty of PCIe 4.0 drives, and if you want something faster, there are high-end PCIe 5.0 drives available. If you need more capacity, well, there are many affordable 4TB drives, and the 8TB WD Black SN850X remains a good choice. Nothing much changes here, but the Plus G4 has its place.

We have the feeling that the Plus G4 would be a reliable drive that runs cool and has at least halfway decent software support. This isn’t a no-name brand slapping its name on random hardware. It’s a viable alternative and is a safe pick for a last-minute build or project. At the end of the day, the Plus G4 is not terribly exciting, but it’s a good SSD – not everything has to be covered in liquid cooling and RGB – and we can readily recommend it.

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