Kioxia Exceria Plus, a fast external SSD reviewed: Almost 1,000 MB/s

Kioxia, formerly Toshiba Memory, offers various internal NVMe SSDs. They provided us with the Kioxia Exceria Plus external SSD featuring 1 TB of storage for testing. This model, priced around US$100 on Amazon, is also available with 512 GB and 2 TB storage options, catering to content creators.

We rigorously tested the supposedly high-speed USB storage device on four different devices: an Android smartphone with slightly slower USB-C 3.1 OTG, a MacBook Air M1 with USB-C 3.2 Gen 2, an Alienware 13 R3 with Thunderbolt 3 and USB-C 3.1 ports, an Aorus 15G with Thunderbolt 3, and the recently tested Medion Erazer Crawler E40, which lacks Thunderbolt but features USB 3.2 Gen 2.

For testing purposes, we used AS SSD and CrystalDiskMark 8 on the Windows laptops, ArmorphousDiskMark and Blackmagicdesign Disk Speed Test on the Mac, and Cross-Platform Disk Test (CPDT) on the Android smartphone.

With USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 and Thunderbolt 3, the external Kioxia SSD runs at almost maximum speed; sequential transfer speeds range from about 700 to 1,000 MB/s, depending on the device and test program. Particularly in Crystaldiskmark, the results are nearly perfect; in AS SSD, they are slightly lower, except for the Medion Crawler E40. With USB 3.1, the rate is nearly cut in half, and on the Android smartphone, the transfer rates are much reduced.

The SSD, therefore, fulfills its advertising promise of up to 1,000 MB/s quite well. This makes the SSD at least suitable for swapping out games and backing up larger content. However, the SSD does have one weakness, which is revealed in our practical test of the Kioxia Exceria Plus external SSD.