The Toshiba RC100 SSD Review: Tiny Drive In A Big Market
by Billy Tallis on June 14, 2018 9:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Light
Our Light storage test has relatively more sequential accesses and lower queue depths than The Destroyer or the Heavy test, and it's by far the shortest test overall. It's based largely on applications that aren't highly dependent on storage performance, so this is a test more of application launch times and file load times. This test can be seen as the sum of all the little delays in daily usage, but with the idle times trimmed to 25ms it takes less than half an hour to run. Details of the Light test can be found here. As with the ATSB Heavy test, this test is run with the drive both freshly erased and empty, and after filling the drive with sequential writes.
Once again the 240GB Toshiba RC100 exhibits very poor performance overall when the drive is full, and the 480GB doesn't do particularly well in that situation either. But for the more typical case of running the Light test on a drive that isn't full, both RC100s are competitive with other low-end NVMe SSDs and much faster than SATA drives.
Most of the low-end NVMe SSDs show substantially higher latency when running the Light test on a full drive, so the RC100's results aren't quite as extreme an outlier. The RC100 is actually better off with HMB off for the full-drive runs of this test, possibly because the overhead of the extra PCIe communication isn't worthwhile when the cache isn't going to be of much use.
Average read and write latencies are both competitive for the RC100's empty-drive test runs, and the full-drive read latencies are high but aren't extreme outliers. It's the write latency that really causes problems for the RC100 when it is full.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores show similar results to the averages, but more prominently highlight the drives that are having trouble—which is mostly just the RC100, though the 600p's 99th percentile write latency is pretty bad, too.
The Toshiba RC100 doesn't quite manage to beat the Crucial MX500 SATA drive for energy usage on this test, but it's first-place among its NVMe competition for the empty-drive test runs, and isn't unreasonably power-hungry even when it is performing poorly.
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PeachNCream - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I care. I like seeing what's happening in the rest of the market outside of the highest end hardware since I am more likely to allocate less money to a computer than is required to get top performing parts. Why waste the money on something as unimportant as a computer component when there's a retirement account and a comfortable post-work life to enjoy as soon as humanly possible? Priorities kid, you've got to figure out what matters most in life. Protip: It's not computer parts.chrnochime - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
You!= everyone. So don't ask such silly question as "did anyone care" because of course there are ppl out there that care.smilingcrow - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
970 Pro is mainly for show-offs. If you actually need high end performance there are faster and more cost effective solutions.mr_tawan - Friday, June 15, 2018 - link
It's probably down the pipe. And if it's not, then you can buy them a review unit.bananaforscale - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
Like it or not, low end sells much more than high. Not that a low-end NVMe drive is slow by typical standards.u.of.ipod - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Billy nice write-up, good to see something a little different. I've read some reviews and am wondering why NVMe is really taking off for lower end drives? From what I can tell even if you compare top of the line NVMe drives against your average SATA SSD, the real world differences are pretty slim for the majority of use cases. Why try to shove NVMe into the low-end market? Is SATA going away? Are many new M.2 slots not compatible with both SATA and NVMe?I've really only used SATA M.2 drives thus far and have been happy with the results.
MajGenRelativity - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I'm not sure why, but it could be about standardizing on NVMe. If everything supports NVMe, there don't need to be as many SATA ports, which saves companies some moneyMidwayman - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Halo effect and marketing? Is there really any reason a NVMe drive needs to be more expensive? So long as most computers are supporting it now you might as well standardize new drives on the newer interface.bug77 - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
On top of that, NVMe comes with higher power draw. Because PCIe vs SATA.PeachNCream - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
That can be fixed with technological development. For now, SATA is more power-efficient, but as NVMe becomes more popular, market forces will create a demand for higher efficiencies and the problem will be soon enough.