The Toshiba TR200 3D NAND SSD Review: One Step Forward, One Step Back
by Billy Tallis on October 11, 2017 7:00 AM ESTConclusion
Toshiba's 3D NAND has been a long time coming. The first generation BiCS 3D NAND never hit the market, and the second generation had a limited release last year in a few niche products. This third generation design with 64 layers is finally ready for the broader market, and both the 256Gb and 512Gb parts are in mass production. The first SSD Toshiba shipped with BiCS 3 3D NAND was the XG5 NVMe SSD for OEMs, and it was a great way to start things off. The Toshiba TR200 brings that same 3D NAND to retail SSD market, but the impact is very different. The Toshiba TR200 is an entry-level budget SATA SSD, and the performance reflects that on virtually every test. It's slower than its predecessors and slower than the entry-level SSDs from many other major brands.
With that said, it's not all bad news: the Toshiba TR200 is very power efficient, and its performance and power consumption don't get much worse when the drive is full. The Toshiba TR200 has higher than normal latency across the board, but unlike many budget SSDs, the TR200 is pretty good about keeping latency from shooting through the roof when it's subjected to a heavy sustained workload. Only the heaviest of write-intensive workloads will cause the TR200's latency to occasionally spike to be many times higher than normal for a budget SATA SSD, and even then the read latency doesn't get too bad. Power draw rarely exceeds 1W, even during synthetic benchmarks.
Given how NAND flash prices have been driven up over the past year by an industry-wide shortage, it's no surprise that Toshiba has switched their entry-level product over to a DRAMless controller to keep costs under control. Toshiba has shown before that they are willing to participate in a race to the bottom: the original Trion 100 was one of the products that led the transition from MLC to TLC, sacrificing performance to reach new levels of affordability.
| SATA SSD Price Comparison | |||
| 240-275GB | 480-525GB | 960-1050GB | |
| Toshiba TR200 (MSRP) | $89.99 (37¢/GB) | $149.99 (31¢/GB) | $289.99 (30¢/GB) |
| ADATA SU800 | $89.99 (35¢/GB) | $158.65 (31¢/GB) | $274.99 (27¢/GB) |
| Crucial BX300 | $89.99 (38¢/GB) | $149.99 (31¢/GB) | |
| Crucial MX300 | $92.99 (34¢/GB) | $149.99 (29¢/GB) | $279.99 (27¢/GB) |
| Intel SSD 545s | $99.99 (39¢/GB) | $179.99 (35¢/GB) | |
| Samsung 850 EVO | $99.95 (40¢/GB) | $159.99 (32¢/GB) | $327.99 (33¢/GB) |
| SanDisk Ultra 3D | $99.99 (40¢/GB) | $164.99 (33¢/GB) | $284.99 (29¢/GB) |
| WD Blue 3D NAND | $98.39 (38¢/GB) | $164.65 (33¢/GB) | $299.99 (30¢/GB) |
At its initial MSRP, the TR200 isn't setting any records and isn't even the cheapest SATA SSD from a major brand. However, the arrival of Toshiba's 3D NAND in mass market quantities should start alleviating the NAND flash shortage and allow prices to start creeping downward over the next several months. The TR200 will probably drop a bit below MSRP once the novelty wears off and supplies are plentiful, and from there I expect Toshiba to adjust pricing to keep up with any overall industry shifts.
The cheapest SSDs from major brands currently go for at least 27 ¢/GB, while the TR200's MSRP starts at 30 ¢/GB. It probably needs to get down to around 25 ¢/GB to be a good deal. I'd like to see that happen for the holiday sales this winter, but I don't see that as likely. The manufacturers don't want to drop prices any sooner than they need to, and 64L 3D NAND still isn't quite plentiful from any of the manufacturers. There's hope that the situation will be much improved in the first half of next year, and the TR200 is an important step on that path.
But until Toshiba can bring the TR200 prices way down, it's making their 3D NAND look bad. Toshiba should hurry up and deliver a retail counterpart to the XG5 as the successor to the OCZ RD400. And for the consumer SATA market, they should seriously reconsider leaving the TR200 and VX500 as the only options until BiCS4 is ready. The last-generation controllers used in the TR150 and VX500 may not be ready for 3D NAND, but the consumers are, and the TR200 isn't enough to satisfy the demand. Going into 2018, Toshiba needs a higher-performing SATA SSD that goes up to 2TB.
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HollyDOL - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Have to admit, 250GB is enough so far, but it's tight, my next SSD will be at least 500GB for sure.yankeeDDL - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
For XBONE and PS4 SSD make no sense, IMHO: you need large storage space, and speed is (nearly) irrelevant.At $89,99 you buy 3TB HDD (and some 4TB on discount) which will perform identically when connected via USB, but offer more than 10X the storage.
250GB SSD are nearly useless: just barely as a boot disk if the performance is "good", which it isn't in this case.
takeshi7 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
As someone who uses an SSD in their PS4 and Xbox One, I think it's worth it, but it definitely depends on the game. Forza and Elder Scrolls Online loads so much faster off of an SSD compared to a hard drive I've probably saved hours of loading screens. But in Destiny you have to wait for the servers and I've found an SSD doesn't cut as much time off of the loading screens.rrinker - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
My work laptop has a 500GB 850 EVO, but I also run VMs on it so I have single files that are 30GB. My new machine at home has a 500GB 850 EVO, just because. I don't game on that one, it doesn't even have a discrete video card, it's my workbench computer for electronics stuff, and the Arduino IDE and Visual Studio don't need discrete graphics. The 500GB is actually probbaly overkill, but it had been sitting on my desk for 5 months waiting for me to install it in my OTHER desktop. That one is an older machine but with a 970 it easily plays anything I play. Other than the video card, the machine is about 6 years old, originally built with a regular hard drive but then I upgraded it with a 250GB 830 EVO. It still has a spinny disk a D drive an the real space hog but not performance intensive things all go there, so so far the 250GB has been sufficient (hovers around 90GB free since upgrading to Win 10). I don't game a lot, and when I do I'm a serial gamer - one game at a time. When I get bored with that and move on to the next, I uninstall the old one.steve wilson - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Would that not be more of a monogamous gamer? I'm pretty much the same, I stick with one game most of the time, up until recently. PUBG and Rocket league now.rocky12345 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Yep you got a point the games are getting so big that 250-500GB space gets tight real fast. I have a 500GB SSD and 3 4TB drives in Raid 0+1 config which makes the mech drives perform very good. If I do find a game that takes a while to load up off of the 4TB drive config I just copy it to the SSD Drive and see very quick load times then. 2 games come to mind so far that I have done this with GTA V & Fallout 4. Both of those games see a huge boost in loading times shortened by doing this.Fallen Kell - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Just trying to figure out how you are using 3 drives to do a 0+1 RAID which clearly needs 4 drives to work... I mean I guess you could have created 2 partitions on each drive and then 0+1'ed the partitions and were extremely careful in the strip'ed mirror creations such that drive 1 has mirror of drive 3, drive 2 has mirror of drive 1, and drive 3 has mirror of drive 2...Again, just wondering.
rocky12345 - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Yea I just asked my friend who set it up and he said it was setup as Raid 01 hybrid 3 drive setup. He said yes 4 drives are much better for this setup. I asked him why he did not tell me this at the beginning his response "you never asked".the way he explained it was to picture it as with drive 1 with A1,A2,A3 Drive 2 with A1,A3,A4 Drive 3 with A2,A3 he even showed me a picture of this to make me see what he did and explained to me.
Now I am debating on just killing this raid setup and just making a Raid 0 config with 2 of the drive and have the third as a storage backup or picking up another 4TB drive and doing the proper configuration and not a non standard like I have now. He seems to think I should just leave it alone as it works well and the speed is good as it sits. Not sure what to do now I do not like having things done half fast...lol
rocky12345 - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
I just wanted to add reading your comment it looks like he may have set it up the way you said it could be done because he did say it was a bit tricky meshing it all together so it would work properly with the 3 drives only. If you think I should get a another 4TB drive and just have the raid configured again I am thinking that is the best option. I won't lose anything it is all backed up on externals anyways and whatever is not are just not worth backing up.Pork@III - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Sequential Read 555 MB/s 555 MB/s 555 MB/sSequential Write 540 MB/s 540 MB/s 540 MB/s
7 years long periood of same speed of ordinary SSD's