The Toshiba RC100 SSD Review: Tiny Drive In A Big Market
by Billy Tallis on June 14, 2018 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Destroyer truly lives up to its name when presented with the Toshiba RC100. High-end NVMe SSDs complete this test in as little as seven hours. Mainstream SSDs usually take more like twelve hours. The 240GB Toshiba RC100 took 34 hours, leaving us with insufficient time to run the test again with HMB off. The Host Memory Buffer doesn't even come close making an impact on how long the larger 480GB model took, because The Destroyer simply moves too much data for a small cache to matter.
The average latency from the 480GB RC100 on The Destroyer is at least twice as high as that of other low-end NVMe SSDs, and the 240GB's latency is an order of magnitude worse. The situation for 99th percentile latency is even worse, leaving the RC100 looking bad even in comparison to most SATA SSDs.
The average read latency of the 480GB RC100 is a bit high but still within the normal range for most SSDs, but the 240GB stands out with more than twice the read latency. For writes, both capacities of the RC100 score poorly, and this is why the overall average tanked.
In spite of its DRAMless design, the 480GB RC100 manages a decent 99th percentile read latency score, but its smaller sibling can't control read latency under a workload this heavy. For writes, both capacities have very high 99th percentile latency, with the 240GB approaching a full second for its worst-case completion times.
The Toshiba RC100 uses relatively little power, but its poor performance means that the test runs long enough that total energy usage isn't great. The 240GB RC100's run of The Destroyer went on for longer than any other SSD tested in recent memory, leaving it with an energy usage score that looks more like what a desktop hard drive would produce.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
62 Comments
View All Comments
PeachNCream - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I care. I like seeing what's happening in the rest of the market outside of the highest end hardware since I am more likely to allocate less money to a computer than is required to get top performing parts. Why waste the money on something as unimportant as a computer component when there's a retirement account and a comfortable post-work life to enjoy as soon as humanly possible? Priorities kid, you've got to figure out what matters most in life. Protip: It's not computer parts.chrnochime - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
You!= everyone. So don't ask such silly question as "did anyone care" because of course there are ppl out there that care.smilingcrow - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
970 Pro is mainly for show-offs. If you actually need high end performance there are faster and more cost effective solutions.mr_tawan - Friday, June 15, 2018 - link
It's probably down the pipe. And if it's not, then you can buy them a review unit.bananaforscale - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
Like it or not, low end sells much more than high. Not that a low-end NVMe drive is slow by typical standards.u.of.ipod - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Billy nice write-up, good to see something a little different. I've read some reviews and am wondering why NVMe is really taking off for lower end drives? From what I can tell even if you compare top of the line NVMe drives against your average SATA SSD, the real world differences are pretty slim for the majority of use cases. Why try to shove NVMe into the low-end market? Is SATA going away? Are many new M.2 slots not compatible with both SATA and NVMe?I've really only used SATA M.2 drives thus far and have been happy with the results.
MajGenRelativity - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I'm not sure why, but it could be about standardizing on NVMe. If everything supports NVMe, there don't need to be as many SATA ports, which saves companies some moneyMidwayman - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Halo effect and marketing? Is there really any reason a NVMe drive needs to be more expensive? So long as most computers are supporting it now you might as well standardize new drives on the newer interface.bug77 - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
On top of that, NVMe comes with higher power draw. Because PCIe vs SATA.PeachNCream - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
That can be fixed with technological development. For now, SATA is more power-efficient, but as NVMe becomes more popular, market forces will create a demand for higher efficiencies and the problem will be soon enough.