Last week, Kioxia rounded out their lineup of PCIe 4.0 enterprise and datacenter SSDs with the announcement of the XD6. Now, they're bringing PCIe 4.0 support to their client NVMe product line with the new XG7 and XG7-P M.2 NVMe SSDs. The XG7 family doubles the sequential read speed and increases sequential write speed by 60% compared to the XG6 series, thanks to the PCIe 4.0 support and a new SSD controller. Based on XG6 specs, this should be at least 6.3GB/s reads and 4.6GB/s writes for the XG7. That's may not be quite fast enough for high-end consumer SSDs sold at retail, but for an OEM-only client SSD it's still extremely fast.
For the first time, Kioxia (formerly Toshiba Memory) is introducing the higher performance/higher capacity -P models at the same time as the base models in their XG series. The XG7 will be available in capacities from 256GB to 1TB, and the XG7-P will offer 2TB and 4TB capacities. This likely makes the XG7-P the first client OEM SSD to add a 4TB NVMe option.
Full performance specs for the XG7(-P) family have not yet been announced, but in terms of features Kioxia is implementing NVMe 1.4 support and TCG Opal and TCG Pyrite security options. The XG7 and XG7-P will start appearing in pre-built systems in 2021. Unlike the past two generations, we're not getting review samples of the XG7, so we'll have to wait until next year to get first-hand experience with Kioxia's PCIe 4.0 solution.
