Kioxia's New EG7 SSDs Promise Fast and Cheap Storage for PC Makers

Kioxia is rolling out a new solid state drive (SSD) line, the EG7 series, that is its first client solution to feature the company's BiCS Flash generation 8 4-bit-per-cell, quadruple-level cell (QLC) technology, the company announced today. Or put in plain English, Kioxia's newest SSDs aim to deliver more affordable storage options for PC OEMs. The launch comes four months after Kioxia unveiled its value-driven Exceria G3 SSDs to quell storage price hike anxiety.

In theory, the launch should enable PC makers to keep storage (and, by extension, total system) costs down. Kioxia envisions its EG7 series being implemented in value-oriented slim laptop designs, as well as both commercial and consumer notebooks and desktops.

Budget or value can sometimes be code for slow, but in this case, Kioxia says its BiCS Flash generation 8-based SSDs are capable of up to 7,000MB/s for sequential reads and up to 6,200MB/s for sequential reads, as well as 1,000,000 IOPS for 4K random reads and writes.

These new models are PCIe 4.0 drives, and while the rated speeds are not the fastest around, they're peppy enough for most users. To put the reads and writes into perspective, the theoretical maximum throughput for four lanes on the PCIe 4.0 highway is around 7.88GB/s. Overhead cuts into that redline figure.

Kioxia's new EG7 series comes close to the top rated speeds we've seen for sequential reads, while sequential writes drop further below while remaining reasonably fast overall. For a more concrete comparison, Samsung's 990 Pro SSDs are rated to hit up to 7,450MB/s for sequential reads and 6,900MB/s for sequential writes.

"Modern client storage must balance performance, efficiency and cost to meet the evolving needs of everyday business computing. With the Kioxia EG7 series, we deliver great design flexibility and device management supported through NVMe 2.0d, while also leveraging our BiCS FLASH generation 8 QLC for improved power efficiency and reducing total cost of ownership," says Axel Stoermann, VP & Chief Technology Officer at Kioxia Europe GmbH.

Kioxia says its new EG7 series SSDs will be offered in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB capacities.