The Toshiba TR200 3D NAND SSD Review: One Step Forward, One Step Back
by Billy Tallis on October 11, 2017 7:00 AM ESTPower Management
Real-world client storage workloads leave SSDs idle most of the time, so the active power measurements presented earlier in this review only account for a small part of what determines a drive's suitability for battery-powered use. Especially under light use, the power efficiency of a SSD is determined mostly be how well it can save power when idle.
SATA SSDs are tested with SATA link power management disabled to measure their active idle power draw, and with it enabled for the deeper idle power consumption score and the idle wake-up latency test. Our testbed, like any ordinary desktop system, cannot trigger the deepest DevSleep idle state.
Idle power management for NVMe SSDs is far more complicated than for SATA SSDs. NVMe SSDs can support several different idle power states, and through the Autonomous Power State Transition (APST) feature the operating system can set a drive's policy for when to drop down to a lower power state. There is typically a tradeoff in that lower-power states take longer to enter and wake up from, so the choice about what power states to use may differ for desktop and notebooks.
We report two idle power measurements. Active idle is representative of a typical desktop, where none of the advanced PCIe link or NVMe power saving features are enabled and the drive is immediately ready to process new commands. The idle power consumption metric is measured with PCIe Active State Power Management L1.2 state enabled and NVMe APST enabled.
Drives using the Phison S10 controller have usually been the clear winners in the active idle power consumption test but not quite competitive when the slumber state us activated. The S11 controller used by the TR200 seems to be a little less effective at saving power with slumber state disabled, but when it's enabled they set a new record and are just barely within the resolution of our meter.
The exceptional idle power management of the TR200 comes at the cost of a fairly high wake-up latency, about 2.4 milliseconds, more than twenty times as long as the TR150 takes to wake up.
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DanNeely - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
in other news the SATA3 bottleneck is still the SATA3 bottleneck.Faster drives are all PCIe based, so the odds of a SATA4 bumping it up again anytime soon are remote; especially since the SATA API/etc are a poor fit for SSDs and hurt performance a bit. If spinning rust remains relevant long enough for SATA to bottleneck again we might see a new standard revision in a few years; but by then the consumer SSD market will probably be all sticks.
Lord of the Bored - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
I honestly can't see hard disks going away completely any time soon. They're still much slower than flash, but flash isn't going to challenge them on the price per byte angle any time soon. 'S why I'm not pure silicon: I have an actual disk for data storage(particularly video files).The price advantage ALSO keeps them shipping in laptops, but the things going into lower-end laptops aren't exactly winning any races.
That said, the pressure for faster hard disks has definitely let up in the years since the first solid-state drives shipped. People trust a lot more of their data to remote servers than they did back then.
The main thing driving capacity increases at this point is commercial users(all that server-side storage moves the demands out of the home), so I don't see SATA3 being a hard disk bottleneck any time soon either. SAS may need an update at some point, though.
dave_the_nerd - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
That's the SATA3 bottleneck. If you want faster, you get a PCI-E drive.sonny73n - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
PCI-E will be the bottleneck soon in the future. For now, SATA3 serve me just fine. They don't slow my gaming or anything. Unless I transfer back and forth 10TB of my videos collection from one SATA3 drive to another every day, I don't see a reason to waste my money on soon-to-be obsolete tech.Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Having drives that can saturate a PCIe link doesn't mean that the PCIe link will be a meaningful bottleneck. We're getting to the point where latency matters far more than throughput (ie. flash vs. 3D XPoint), and aside from that, storage is usually less of a bottleneck than CPU and network and other components.jabber - Friday, October 13, 2017 - link
Indeed, the effect of a 200MB bit of software loading up on a 550 MBps SATA SSD and a 3000MBps NVME SSD are to all intents, identical to the human eye. Never has the promise of a 6 times jump in performance actually given so little.dromoxen - Tuesday, October 17, 2017 - link
550/540 IS the max of SATA 3 ssds .. the rest is lost in overhead and inefficiencys. Just like usb2 vs usb3 should be ten times faster , best I've ever got is 4x faster.heavy soil - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
The speed limit is SATA, the only way to be faster is PCIe (or I guess SAS).What has improved on the good SATA SSDs is the speed they deal with big queues, and coping with heavy writing too.
rocky12345 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Thanks for the look at the drive.So this is what dram less drives perform like? All I got to say is ouch those were some bad numbers from this drive. I have the Samsung EVO 850 Pro 512GB Sata drive still and my drive walks circles around this drive in every aspect. Yes my drive cost me a bit more but I have had it for like 2 years now and I am sure the cost of my drive has come down close to what this Toshiba drive now costs. If dram less drives perform like this then the cost to buy into them should be a lot lower than the higher end drives cost. Thanks again for the review your testing here is not flawed but this drive sure is.
Janis2017 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
That was stupid to give away 90 euro for product who only works 10 years 750evoI hope samsung firmware is ok. I dont need write protected drive.
I dont haw money for one more.