Eight external SSDs were at the starting line of our comparison test; eight made it to the finish line - there was no total failure to report. First of all: The fact that the currently fastest USB SSDs according to USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 do not deliver their speed advantage on a Mac, at least at present, is not due to the manufacturers of the SSDs...

The Exceria Plus G3 from Kioxia is an ideal supplementary drive for users who need to store and read very large data. However, it should be equipped with a heat sink.

The Kioxia Exceria Plus G3 proves to be a good mainstream SSD in the test, which is very attractive due to its low price. The SSD offers high sequential transfer rates and shows good performance, especially when writing. However, it shows weaknesses when reading and especially when randomly reading 4K blocks and is somewhat slower than many other PCIe 4.0 SSDs...

Kioxia builds the cheapest SSD in this test, but also one of the slowest: The Exceria Plus G3 achieves just over 5 GByte/s when reading, and not even 4 GByte/s when writing. Despite nominally fast TLC memory, it only manages 400 MByte/s when writing completely using H2testw. Kioxia uses its own memory from the BiCS6 series with 162 layers, but unlike usual, it does not have its own SSD controller...