The Toshiba Q300 SSD Review: Toshiba Becomes a Retail Brand
by Billy Tallis on February 26, 2016 8:00 AM ESTIdle Power Consumption
Since the ATSB tests based on real-world usage cut idle times short to 25ms, their power consumption scores paint an inaccurate picture of the relative suitability of drives for mobile use. During real-world client use, a solid state drive will spend far more time idle than actively processing commands. Our testbed doesn't support the deepest DevSlp power saving mode that SATA drives can implement, but we can measure the power usage in the intermediate slumber state where both the host and device ends of the SATA link enter a low-power state and the drive is free to engage its internal power savings measures.
We also report the drive's idle power consumption while the SATA link is active and not in any power saving state. Drives are required to be able to wake from the slumber state in under 10 milliseconds, but that still leaves plenty of room for them to add latency to a burst of I/O. Because of this, many desktops default to either not using SATA Aggressive Link Power Management (ALPM) at all or to only enable it partially without making use of the device-initiated power management (DIPM) capability. Additionally, SATA Hot-Swap is incompatible with the use of DIPM, so our SSD testbed usually has DIPM turned off during performance testing.
Our SATA power measurements are conducted using a meter with a resolution of 1mA for the current on the 5V rail, giving our power consumption scores a resolution of 5mW. (The meter can offer microampere resolution for currents up to 400mA, but many drives would blow that fuse before the OS could put them to sleep.)
For mobile use, the Q300 falls in the second tier of drives that have acceptable but not great power consumption in the slumber state. Differences of a few tens of milliwatts won't have much impact on battery life for the kinds of devices that use 2.5" drives rather than M.2 or mSATA SSDs.
In a desktop situation with SATA ALPM disabled, the Q300 and Trion 100 offer the best idle power consumption. The other low-end TLC drives are drawing three times as much power.
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cbjwthwm - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
Yes that quote in the review is out to lunch, this drive had the same problems as the Trion 100 with launching on flawed firmware 11.1, which had major reliability bugs--hence the bad user reviews like the Trion 100. Toshiba's link to the updated 11.2 firmware (from late November) is here:http://support.toshiba.com/support/viewContentDeta...
The reviewer needs to at least search for an updated firmware version before writing such oblivious comments that make his review seem very badly researched right off the mark.
serendip - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
Big issue with the Q300 and its identical twin OCZ Trion 100 - they don't work with certain Nvidia chipsets, mainly those in Macbooks from 2010 and earlier. You can format the drive on a Macbook but read/write operations stall.OCZ are aware of the problem but have stated on their official forum that they can't do anything to avoid breaking support for newer chipsets. Toshiba haven't said a darn thing.
yuhong - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
Is there any more technical details like which part of the SATA protocol the problems comes from?serendip - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
No idea, maybe some power management issues? I've tried Sandforce and Samsung 850 Evo drives on those older Macbooks and they work fine. It's the new Toshiba controller that doesn't play well with MCP79/89 chipsets. OCZ have known about this for 3 months and have told customers facing this situation to get a refund and buy another drive whereas Toshiba are keeping silent. Guess that OCZ acquisition hasn't streamlined corporate lines of communication.Kristian Vättö - Sunday, February 28, 2016 - link
From what I've heard it's a problem Apple would have to fix through a firmware update. OCZ/Toshiba can't fix it, or at least not without massive changes. In the end it's a relatively small niche anyway.serendip - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
It happens only under OSX, all versions, on the Nvidia MCP chipset platform. The Q300 works fine in Windows on those affected Macbooks.cbjwthwm - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
The nVidia SATA compatibility problem lies with the drive's Phison S10 controller, and it affects all products using that controller from various manufacturers such as Patriot, Corsair, and Kingston lines using it. Since Phison has been sitting on their hands with this issue for around a year a half (its first use was the Neutron XT iirc), I doubt they're going to get their act together for OCZ but I suppose we can hope?Harry Lloyd - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
Still waiting for a decent 500 GB drive under 100 $. Near the end of this year, maybe?dealcorn - Monday, February 29, 2016 - link
I understand that you can not test Devslp. Does Toshiba represent that the Q300 supports Devslp?watzupken - Monday, February 29, 2016 - link
For me, planar TLC will never fly, especially after the Samsung EVO 840 fiasco. The combination of TLC with shrinking NAND size is a perfect recipe for disaster, not to mention that they are not significantly cheaper than their MLC counterpart. There are MLC SSDs out there that run on lesser known controllers, but for some brands I feel its more reliable than the TLC+planar NAND combination.