TINY SINGLE CHIP 1TB NVME SSD!! – Kioxia BG4 Review

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Have you ever seen a 1TB SSD in such a small package? Especially one that’s an NVMe drive that can keep up with full size drives like the WD SN500! Technically speaking, this is a standard form factor, it’s a 2230 drive meaning it’s 22mm wide and 30mm long, which is just a shorter version of the 2280 drive we are all used to. And actually, if you look at the SN500 you’ll notice the very few components onboard and a quick search reveals they sell the newer 530 drives in the 2230 form factor, so I guess this Kioxia one isn’t so special… Wait a second… Is that a single chip? It is! Huh?

Let’s take a quick look at the WD drive again for reference. It has 2 main “chips”, one is the controller and the other is the NAND flash. Many drives actually have 3 chips, with the third being a DRAM cache which is normally pretty important for real world performance. So, looking at the BG4, how can this only have one chip? Well, that’s where the magic of Kioxia (also known as Toshiba) comes in. They are one of the few NAND flash manufacturers worldwide, which gives them the advantage of being able to design and build unique products like this.

This chip is both the controller AND the flash, the only thing it doesn’t have is DRAM but we will get to that in a second. The controller supports NVMe 1.3b and runs at PCIe Gen 3 x4 over the standard M.2 M key connector on the top edge. The NAND is KIOXIA’s 96 layer BiCS flash which is TLC or three bit, which is generally the best balance of performance and reliability. It does incorporate around 32GB of SLC cache, or single bit, which allows it to write at it’s headline speeds of up to 1.8GB/s, and it’s headline read speed is around 2.3GB/s.

Now I mentioned this doesn’t have any DRAM – I mean, it doesn’t have space for it so it’s not too surprising, but that should lead to degraded real world performance as drives without a DRAM cache store their lookup tables – the big list of where each piece of data is stored within the flash – in flash itself which is much slower both in bandwidth, but more importantly in latency. Kioxia thought of that though, which is why they implemented one of the features first introduced with NVMe 1.2 called Host Memory Buffer or HMB.

Long story short, HMB copies the lookup table to your system memory instead of a DRAM cache, which for the right workloads is a significant benefit over storing it just on the flash. It’s not quite as good as having DRAM onboard, but it’s a welcome addition and has been improved upon with this BG4 model over their last BG3 drive too.

Now I’ve talked about the specs for a fair bit here, I think it’s time to look at it’s performance. Starting with the synthetic benchmarks, Crystal Disk Mark as always provides the highest headline figures, with a peak of just under 1.8GB/s in reads and just shy of 1.3GB/s in writes. This is on a fresh drive, using a Ryzen 5600X and ASRock B550 Steel Legend motherboard. This isn’t quite up to the same headline figures Kioxia quote, but it’s right in line with what many drives like this offer.

Taking a look at AS SSD, this offers a more bleak look at the sequential write performance at under 1GB/s, although it is an incredibly short test. The sequential reads are better at around 1.6GB/s and compared to the SN500 this BG4 is a touch faster in 4K and 4K 64 thread reads, although struggles by comparison on writes. In AS SSD it offers very similar read performance to the SN500, albeit with slower write performance across the range.

In a straight file transfer test from a high end gen 3 SSD it peaked at around 1GB/s which is pretty decent, although once it filled its SLC cache that dropped down to more like 650MB/s. That’s still pretty respectable, but far from high end. Finally in my usual file duplication stress test, duplicating a large dataset of around 100GB of files to stress the controllers read and write capabilities it had a lot more variance in its speed than I’m used to seeing. It bounced between 550MB/s and 300MB/s, which still isn’t too bad although on the lower end is about the same as a good SATA SSD.

The thing is, the performance this tiny thing offers isn’t really the key selling point here. This isn’t meant to be a consumer drive – or more specifically it’s not meant to be a drive you as an end user can just go and buy. You can, but the markup is pretty high. The prospective buyer for these are manufacturers who will be buying a pallet load to install in ultra-thin laptops, thin clients and even embedded devices. The fact this is a single package is the key, it means that Kioxia can actually sell just the chip itself for laptop makers to solder to their PCBs directly meaning that machine can be thinner and more compact while still carrying up to 1TB of storage space. That’s pretty impressive.

Even as an M.2 drive, being able to take up this little space inside a laptop’s chassis with up to a terabyte of storage is a clear advantage. Even in a gaming laptop you could make the argument that one, or even two in RAID 0, of these installed instead of one or two long 2280 drives could free up room for larger batteries or better cooling without increasing the size of the frame. That’s a great benefit. Sure it’s not going to be as blisteringly fast as some, but it’s plenty fast enough for pretty much any use case where having a drive this small is necessary.

There are also some other nice benefits to this size, as Wendell pointed out in a video over on the Level1Techs channel, a number of cameras that record at high bitrates, frame rates and resolutions already record to PCIe based storage, meaning with a bit of tinkering you could feasibly replace your painfully expensive storage cards with an adapter and one of these and not only get similar or better performance, but way more storage space.

So, should you buy a BG4? If you are only going to stick it in your desktop motherboard or gaming laptop that doesn’t require a 2230 drive, probably not. It’s more expensive for an end user to go and buy compared to a number of standard 2280 drives that will fit your systems anyway, and those can offer much better performance overall. But, if you are designing a new laptop or embedded device that could benefit from such a small package, I think it’s worth considering. It’s a pretty unique package both from an M.2 drive form factor and as the chip alone and can have some pretty inventive use cases.