October, 2022

Kioxia Unveils XG8 High-Performance NVMe SSD

SSD Data Recovery Kioxia

The Kioxia XG8 SSD is the true successor to the popular XG6 client drive, offering PCIe 4.0 levels of performance with high-capacity options. Designed for client and OEM environment, the XG8 SSD supports optional features such as TCG Opal 2.01 for encryption and also power loss notification. Its conservative design allows for use in laptops, desktops, gaming PCs and more. This KIoxia’s SSD drive may not be officially available in retail, but it is a suitable choice in a new machine and should be compared to other high-end PCIe 4.0 SSDs.

The XG8 SSD comes with new hardware (a new controller and new BiCS5 flash) and promises better performance. The drive shows random and sequential performance improvements of between 169 and 253% in terms of IOPS and MBps, respectively. Other features make the XG8 SSD useful for client environments which could include workstations, as well.

The Kioxia XG8 NVME SSD is available in 512GB, 1TB, 2TB and 4TB sizes. It is particularly nice to see a 4TB option as TLC drives still often tap out at 2TB. The flash may help here as BiCS5 is known to be available in 1Tb dies, as on the 8TB Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus. However, the 4TB model is double-sided with more NAND packages, so this is not absolutely necessary. The XG8 SSD can hit up to 7.0/5.8 GBps for sequential read and write and 900K/620K random read and write IOPS. Kioxia backs the drive with a 5-year warranty without any official TBW rating because this is an OEM product. The KG8 is also NVMe 1.4 compliant.

The Kioxia XG8 SSD has an option with TCG Opal 2.01 support for each capacity which enables the Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) capability that may be useful for client drive environments. The Kioxia XG8 SSD also supports power loss notification (PLN) through a PCIe sideband signal. This allows the solid-sate drive to flush its data to non-volatile media before power loss through host initialization. This is not the same as power loss protection (PLP), which uses a battery or capacitor to protect data-in-flight. However, theoretically, PLN could be used with off-module PLP (OMP) to add this functionality.

Designed for consistency and reliability, the Kioxia XG8 is a drive that delivers as a comfortable client or OEM SSD, but it is vulnerable to some defects, including abrupt power loss, magnetic fields and electric charges, which may result in potential SSD data loss. Then the owners of machines equipped with Kioxia XG8 SSD will need to contact a professional data recovery services provider. ACE Data Recovery provides recovery services on a full range of hard drives  for all makes and models of laptops, notebooks and server storage. ACE Data Recovery engineers are here to help the owners of devices that use the Kioxia XG8 SSD to get their valuable data back.