 This is a full-fledged NVMe SSD suitable for use in medium performance applications like in a notebook computer. It's got a whopping 1 terabyte of capacity and comes from a company most of you won't have heard of called Kioxia. But at this size, can it possibly be any good? Or should I be expecting performance kind of like when I tried to run Windows on an SD card? You'll find out after this message from our sponsor Ridge Wallet. Ridge Wallet wants to redefine the wallet with its compact frame and RFID blocking interplates. Check out how they can keep wallet bulge down for you and use software code Linus to save 10% and get free worldwide shipping. Back when SSDs started to really take off for consumers, it took loads of NAND dies in order to reach capacities that would be considered, I mean, even back then, enough for a boot drive that holds your operating system and some key performance sensitive applications. This drive from 2010 uses a whopping, look at this, double-sided, 16 chips each with just 4 gigs of capacity to reach its 120 gigs advertised capacity. Once you account for some spare area for wear leveling to improve its lifespan. Now, you could actually get 1 terabyte SSDs back then, but it was very unusual. The OCZ Colossus series was actually available in up to 1 terabyte capacities in 2010, but was one of the only SSDs I'm aware of to have ever shipped in a 3.5 inch form factor. Yes, my friends, it was the size of a hard drive, had not one, but two Indolink controllers, each with their own separate DRAM caches, and like this one, it was covered front and back with NAND flash packages, except that it was a much bigger PCB. Massive shout out, by the way, to Hot Hardware for still having these images of a drive from a decade ago up on their site. There's almost no other real evidence of these things ever existing in the wild, probably because the 1 terabyte LT version would have set you back about $4,000, according to this article from ZDNet, and also my own memory, because I was actually the OCZ product manager at NCIX back when they launched that thing. That is a lot to spend on a high capacity drive that's going to be horribly bottlenecked by a SATA2 interface. So who the heck is Kioxia, and how do they figure into all this? I'm glad you asked. OCZ was acquired by Toshiba back in 2013. Toshiba Memory Corporation was spun off in 2018, and then became Toshiba Memory Holdings Corporation in 2019, which was renamed, you guessed it, Kioxia. So the BG4 is not just some weird AliExpress no-name SSD. This is actually their current generation, business to business, low power consumption, solid state drive, for small form factor systems, and you might very well have one of these in your laptop if you've bought it in the last little while without even knowing it. Unlike older SSDs, there's not actually a lot for us to disassemble here, so I'm just going to take off the sticker. I wonder if it's like a thermal sticker. Wow, it actually does appear to have some kind of a thermal backing on it or something. That can't possibly help. Well, there it is. M.2 interface, bare PCB, and a single package mounted to one side. Now let's compare the BG4's anatomy to a couple more typical drives. Here's the interfaces. Okay, no problem so far. Here's the controller on our typical drive. So this takes the incoming data and spreads it across all the different NAND packages so that none of them are worn out more than the others, which improves drive endurance. It also keeps track of where all the data is and spits it out back to you when you request it. That is in here. And then most modern high-performance drives also have, let's see if I can find it. Ah, yes, here we are, a DRAM cache. So the Kyoksia BG4 doesn't actually have one of those because Kyoksia is using a different approach to this. Typically for acceptable performance, an SSD needs that high-speed DRAM onboard, which actually gets wiped every time it loses power. What it does is it holds a lookup table so that the controller, which again is that one in the middle here, knows where to find all the data that's been scattered around across the NAND flash in order to make it last longer. Now, you can live without it. Some controller architectures, like notably this one or just cheaper ones, don't use a DRAM cache. But in most cases, performance suffers, sometimes to the point where a poorly designed DRAM-less SSD can be slower than a mechanical hard drive. At least that's the case when we're talking about more conventional SATA interface drives. NVMe version 1.2 introduced a feature called the NVMe host memory buffer. It actually lets an SSD that's attached to the system via PCI Express do some of that mapping in system memory. Now, this would never work over SATA because the interface is just too slow. But over PCI Express, it seems like drives that use this feature can cache at least some of that mapping, like at least for the most frequently accessed data in the system memory and make up some of that performance. So that is what's going on here. Enough chit chat. Let's put our thermal sticker back on, as if that's going to do anything, and go ahead and install this puppy. Interesting. This thing is actually only three centimeters long. So you look at it compared to the typical 80 centimeter form factor, and it's like... It's laughable. What's not funny is that I don't really have a way of installing it on the board directly. I grabbed an Asus HyperM.2 X4. That also doesn't have the thing, but I have one more option. Oh, look at that. The DimDot 2. So that's that little thing you can stick in what looks like a memory slot on some Asus boards. Actually has the 30 millimeter mounting hole. That's going to make it so we can't really see it though. Okay, new plan. Okay, so we just need to kind of stick that there to anchor it. During testing, the Kyocera actually did pretty respectably for a system integrator SSD. We got sequential read speeds of around two gigabytes per second and writes well in excess of a gigabyte, with tame write latencies that rarely pushed beyond one millisecond in our single threaded dual file copy and sequential performance test script. Where it stumbled was when we hit it with four simultaneous file copies, where sequential speeds dipped dangerously close to hard drive territory after 10 minutes due to its lack of cooling and internal DRAM cache. But it never gets bad. Obviously, peak speeds are way better on our beefy PCI Express 4.0 Corsair MP600, but it's worth noting that it too begins to stumble around the 10 minute mark under our four file copy load, in some cases coming down as far as the Kyocera. Though it only ever broke a millisecond in write latency once. Those extra NAND chips to the Kyocera's one allow more channels to be active at once, hence better performance. But that's a pretty heavy workload and suffice it to say, with the lighter work one of these will find in a daily driver, you'd be hard pressed to find any difference whatsoever and that's what we saw in PCMark as well. Well, that's pretty impressive. Definitely a darn sight better than the Colossus from back in the day. And what's really cool is that AnonTech actually measured some of the best power consumption that they had ever seen on this thing. So given that its performance is fine, better than SATA at least, at a cost that manages to be cheaper than SATA and at a size that is small enough to make systems like this one, even more compact in the future, I'd say it's pretty sweet but also not terribly compelling for the vast majority of consumers for whom this is already really small and not difficult to fit in their computer, which would probably explain why Kyocera didn't bother making a retail version of the BG4. The only way to get one of these at this time is to buy a computer that happens to have one pre-installed in it by the manufacturer. As for why I bothered making a video about it then, honestly speaking, I just thought it was really cool. I mean, come on, it's an SSD the size of like my thumbnail. You don't think that's cool? No one else is cool? Squarespace. Do you think making a website is hard? Well, it doesn't have to be. 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