Kioxia XG8 2TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD Review

Today we are taking a look at the Kioxia XG8 2TB NVMe SSD. This is a client SSD from Kioxia that is not sold directly at retail. Instead, this is a drive that OEMs would often use in client PCs (e.g. Project TinyMiniMicro PCs.) The XG8 was launched earlier this year and is a high-end PCIe Gen 4 client SSD offering from Kioxia. Kioxia provided today's 2TB sample unit, and I am excited to get to look at this drive since I never managed to get my hands on its predecessor the XG7.

The Kioxia XG8 2TB comes in a single-sided M.2 2280 (80mm) form factor. Our unit came with a decorative sticker and a product label, but we removed them for these pictures.

The XG8 is fairly vertically integrated, with a Kioxia in-house controller and Kioxia BiCS 5 NAND. BiCS 5 is a 112-layer TLC NAND product and when paired with an appropriate controller, is capable of competing with 176-layer Micron NAND. Rounding out the components is a 2GB NANYA LPDDR4 DRAM cache.

As a single-sided drive, the back is bereft of any components.

The Kioxia XG8 line of SSDs is available to OEMs in sizes between 512 GB and 4 TB.

Today we are looking at the 2TB base model of the XG8, which is rated at 7000MB/s sequential read and 5800MB/s sequential write. These rated sequential numbers should pit the XG8 against modern high-end Gen4 SSDs like the Rocket 4 Plus, FireCuda 530, and P41 Platinum, so I have high expectations.

Normally this is the part of the review where I could discuss warranty and endurance, but if you glance at the spec sheet above you will notice that it mentions neither. This is intentional; as mentioned earlier, this drive is not available at retail and is OEM only. For the XG8 your warranty would be between the end user and their vendor like Dell or Lenovo, not directly between Kioxia and the end user. If you do end up with an XG8 drive somehow, via an OEM system or through another channel, do not expect any direct support from Kioxia.

CrystalDiskInfo can give us some basic information about the SSD and confirms we are operating at PCIe 4.0 x4 speeds using NVMe 1.4.

We are using the following configuration for this test:

Our testing uses the Kioxia XG8 2TB as the boot drive for the system, installed in the M.2_1 slot on the motherboard. The drive is filled to 85% capacity with data and then some is deleted, leaving around 60% used space on the volume.

Next, we are going to get into our performance testing.