KIOXIA today announced the KIOXIA EG7 Series of solid state drives, the company’s first client solution to adopt BiCS FLASH generation 8 QLC (quadruple-level cell) technology. The new DRAM-less SSDs are designed to provide affordable storage for value-oriented slim laptops, commercial notebooks, and consumer desktops, and will serve as KIOXIA’s budget alternative to their TLC-based BG7 drives. These are the types of SSDs we often would expect to find in Project TinyMiniMicro and other small systems we review.
Kioxia EG7 Series Announced for PC OEMs
The EG7 Series utilizes Kioxia’s 218-layer BiCS FLASH generation 8 with CBA (CMOS directly Bonded to Array) technology to achieve higher bit densities.
The EG7 Series drives are rated to deliver sequential read speeds up to 7,000 MB/s and sequential write speeds up to 6,200 MB/s. A key point of KIOXIA’s marketing campaign to OEMs is that these specifications match the high-level specifications of the company’s TLC-based BG7 Series, which in principle gives OEMs an option for adopting similarly-performing drives with a lower cost-per-GB.
How well the drives actually perform remains to be seen, and a small degree of skepticism about BG7-like performance is warranted as QLC NAND virtually always offers lower performance than TLC NAND built on the same manufacturing process. More than likely, KIOXIA’s official performance figures are for the drives’ pseudo-SLC cache, which on the EG7 would be similar (if not identical) to the BG7 series since those drives use the same generation of NAND. In which case the figures can still be accurate, but they would not reflect the far more significant performance drop-off that the QLC-based EG7 drives would experience once that cache is exhausted.
The new lineup includes all three major M.2 form factors: Type 2230, Type 2242, and Type 2280. The addition of the 2242 size is notable as we have seen more devices adopt this intermediate length in compact systems.
The drives are PCIe 4.0 compliant and support the NVMe 2.0d specification. Random read and write performance is rated for up to 1,000,000 IOPS, depending on the drive capacity.
| Specification | 512 GB | 1024 GB | 2048 GB |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sequential Read | 6,400 MB/s | 7,000 MB/s | 7,000 MB/s |
| Sequential Write | 5,000 MB/s | 6,000 MB/s | 6,200 MB/s |
| Random Read | 550,000 IOPS | 850,000 IOPS | 1,000,000 IOPS |
| Random Write | 850,000 IOPS | 950,000 IOPS | 1,000,000 IOPS |
Like the adjacent BG7 series, the EG7 is a DRAM-less design using Host Memory Buffer (HMB) technology. This approach allocates a portion of system memory to maintain performance while reducing component costs and power consumption. Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) options based on TCG Opal 2.0 are available for security-conscious deployments.
Final Words
The KIOXIA EG7 series is currently sampling with PC OEM customers, with systems expected to ship in Q2 2026. Pricing has not been announced, but the QLC-based design should enable more affordable configurations in value-oriented laptops and desktops. As with other DRAM-less SSDs in this segment, we expect the EG7 to be primarily deployed in OEM systems rather than sold directly to consumers. We will need to get a review unit in hand to see how the drive performs in real-world workloads before drawing conclusions about its place in the market.
