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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
50 Comments
View All Comments
theniller - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Why is this shit still a thing? The process node is there the stacking is there. Where is my 500 GB slc drive?lilmoe - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
IKRI already pay double for my drives work 50% over provisioning. SLC would cost me the same yet dramatically improve QD1 performance and endurance.
And they say there's no market for that. BS.
cekim - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Engineering you might expect from a company going out of business during the biggest supply shortage we've seen in PC parts in quite some time. Why god why?Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Toshiba's NAND division isn't going out of business; it's thriving. The nuclear power part of Toshiba is just failing so hard that Toshiba as a whole is deeply in the red.mapesdhs - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Way slower and more expensive than an 850 EVO was 2 years ago. *yawn* This race to the bottom re performance/endurance is annoying.I wish the charts would include a couple of older models so so we can really see whether this tech has actually moved on or not, eg. an 840 Pro (wonderful MLC), Vector, Vertex4, Neutron GTX - all of these were already being bottlenecked by the SATA3 limit when the 840 Pro was reviewed on AT 5 years ago. Are these Toshiba models any better than what Samsung/OCZ was back then? The last time I saw it included, the Vector inparticular still looked pretty good. As long as this lack of performance/endurance continues, I just keep hunting for lightly used 840 Pros, etc. Bagged another 256GB recently for 51 UKP.
I miss the days when the 850 EVO 250GB was 53 UKP, everything has become so expensive since then, and not just SSDs. Prices of most RAM types has doubled.
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
I've tested almost all of the older SSDs that I have on hand. Some of the older ones have died, or been transferred to other AT editors for use as boot drives. There are a few old drives I have in active use on various systems that I can clone then run through the test suite (a SandForce drive, a Crucial MX100, a Samsung 840 Pro) when time permits. Fortunately, my testing backlog is almost gone, so I may be able to get some of those drives added to the Bench database later this month.mapesdhs - Friday, October 13, 2017 - link
That would be great Billy, thanks!! 8)Btw, have you seen the article on techreport where they tested a bunch of SSDs to death? The 840 Pro was the final one to go, after it had written an astonishing 2.4PB. IIRC I can't link to other sites directly here, so just search for, "The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead", the piece is written by Geoff Gasior.
artifex - Thursday, October 19, 2017 - link
I know an anecdote is not data, but my Samsung 830, 128GB is still going after about 5 years. Magician says it's pushed 20TB. It's actually still my gaming OS drive, too.Question, though: how come I hear nothing about the 750s, now? Did that line get dropped quickly? I got one in a sale last year, and I hope they're not terrible.
yifu - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
is this the most power efficient SSD in the market today? I have missed the BX100, Now I can not find it anymore.