From KIOXIA we have recently received a new PCIe 4.0 SSD in the form of the EXCERIA PRO 2TB. The product is oriented at gamers, operating on the PCIe Gen4 x4 bus, supporting NVMe 1.3 standards and with a five-year warranty.

The drive is shipped inside a compact cardboard enclosure and right from the frontal area we will note a photo of the product, the capacity, rated read performance but also the size (format which is 2280):

On the back, KIOXIA noted the product internal code name, its manufacturing date, but also some serial numbers:

After unsealing the box, we will note inside a small leaflet which informs the user regarding the procedure of unpacking the product, the drive secured by a transparent plastic compartment but also the Quick Start Guide:

Besides installation information, we will receive info on disposal and FCC:

The top part of the PCB does include a sticker which does not cover the last NAND IC; this is no problem, since the supplied sticker is only esthetic and does not act as a heatspreader:

The back side of the PCB does not contain other components, but only an additional sticker, which notes the product code name, the manufacturing date, the power rating but also the supported standards:

After removing the top sticker, we will note two NAND ICs on each side, while in the middle we do have the controller and a DRAM cache chip:

The EXCERIA PRO integrates KIOXIA’s 112-layer BiCS5 3D TLC NAND ICs:

The SK Hynix DRAM IC for storing the mapping tables is of DDR4 nature and functions at 3200MHz; the total capacity is 2GB:

As noted by AIDA64 as well, the KIOXIA controller is a rebranded Phison E18, which is a high-end SKU with eight channels, uses 5 Arm Cortex R5 cores and is produced on TSMC’s 12nm process: