The Toshiba RC100 SSD Review: Tiny Drive In A Big Market
by Billy Tallis on June 14, 2018 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The ATSB Heavy test is small enough to reveal some impact from the HMB feature: it clearly makes a big difference to full-drive performance for the 480GB model, and slightly improves empty-drive data rates for both capacities. The 240GB falls apart when full, leading to data rates that are inexcusably bad.
The average and 99th percentile latencies from the RC100 are reasonable when the test is run on an empty drive. For the 480GB model, HMB keeps both latency scores from getting out of control even when the drive is full, but the 240GB model has serious issues with or without HMB.
For both average read latency and average write latency, the 480GB RC100's scores with HMB enabled are competitive with the drives that have onboard DRAM. Disabling HMB makes write latency especially stand out when the 480GB model is full.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores for the 480GB RC100 are great when HMB is enabled and acceptable without it. The 240GB model also performs reasonably when the drive is not full.
The power efficiency of the RC100 is generally quite good, except when the 240GB model is full and takes forever to finish the test. The HMB feature is particularly helpful for the 480GB RC100, allowing it to complete the full-drive test using barely more energy than the empty-drive run.
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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.