CONCLUSION

   The EXCERIA PRO 2TB M.2 NVMe by KIOXIA was a sample expected to arrive here earlier this year so taking so long that even the first PCIe 5.0 Gen5 models have already made their appearance was certainly not the ideal scenario for anyone (still certainly better than not at all). That being said I was quite surprised by its overall performance. Yes, it’s not the fastest drive in the charts but it was nice to see that the BiCS TLC NAND flash (112 layer) could go up against Microns (176 layer) solution in quite a few of the tests (competition benefits everyone after all). Thermal throttling during all my tests (SNIA ones especially) was also considerably less compared to similar drives so good news here as well. Unfortunately, performance aside endurance is not something the EXCERIA PRO 2TB really excels at and with a TBW of just 800 when other models of equal capacity have twice as much or even more may drive away some demanding users and professionals (again, for like 99% of users 800TBW is plenty). The SSD utility is not something we haven’t seen many times from other manufacturers, still the ability to overprovision the drive to improve both its performance and endurance is something not everyone out there makes available to users.

   Currently retailing for USD287 inside the USA (Amazon.com) and for 213.95Euros inside the EU (Amazon.de) the EXCERIA PRO 2TB PCIe 4.0 Gen4 M.2 NVMe SSD by KIOXIA is priced well over this side of the Atlantic (not so much on the other however). Price aside the EXCERIA PRO 2TB delivers the kind of performance one would expect from a KIOXIA drive. Yes, endurance may not be quite on par with some other models out there but it’s still more than enough for most users and so the Golden Award is in order.

PROS

- Near Excellent Performance Levels
- 1.5 Million Hours MTTF
- Limited Thermal Throttling
- SSD Utility (Overprovisioning)
- 5 Year Limited Warranty

CONS

- Price (USA)
- Endurance (800TBW)