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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
50 Comments
View All Comments
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.