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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bug77 - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I'm talking about what is, you're talking wishful thinking.PCIe is supposed to cater to a lot of devices, it can't change its sleep current just because of one type of devices in particular. Not saying it's impossible, just that it's highly unlikely.
PeachNCream - Monday, June 18, 2018 - link
Since SATA has not been entirely replaced by NVMe yet, there is still time (and lots of it really) for changes. It's simply a matter of a drive identifying itself to the PCIe bus and then making on-the-fly sleep state changes. Yes, that's non-trivial, but far from wishful thinking.Gasaraki88 - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
SATA needs to go away. That is old technology for old drives. NVMe should be the new standard for hard drives, just like SAS was a better protocol than SATA, NVMe has less overhead and is designed for NAND storage.Targon - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Space, and because people like these super-thin machines. Also, without the extra packaging, it may be less expensive to make a card based SSD compared to a 2.5 inch SSD drive. Smaller=cheaper when it comes to shipping/packaging as well.SATA hasn't really had any evolution over the past few years as well, so without something big to hype, SATA isn't a buzz word that attracts buyers. No SATA 4 standard, so they can't say it is the latest and greatest, while card based SSDs have an appeal as seeming to be a newer technology.
HStewart - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
One thing I am curious about is what performance do you need for SSD in external USB drive - I have a couple of them. These cheaper drivers are probably good for that purposetimecop1818 - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Except cheap USB to M.2 adapters ONLY support SATA drives. The review unit is NVMe.Targon - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
USB 3.1 at the minimum if you want an external SSD in my opinion.HStewart - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
The one I am using ( actually two of them ) is WavLink USB 3.1 Gen 2 that actually does 10gbs 'https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B06Y5XJG8J/ref=o...
It is not intended be primary storage - but works quite nice for my needs.
One thing some one should come out with lower cost TB3 drive case - right now they are at premium.
peevee - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I wonder who would possibly buy the 120GB version given that only extra #20 will bring it to useful capacity and performance?Jorgp2 - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Could you elaborate on how to configure the Host Memory Buffer Size?