The Toshiba RC100 SSD Review: Tiny Drive In A Big Market

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The Destroyer truly lives up to its name when presented with the Toshiba RC100. High-end NVMe SSDs complete this test in as little as seven hours. Mainstream SSDs usually take more like twelve hours. The 240GB Toshiba RC100 took 34 hours, leaving us with insufficient time to run the test again with HMB off. The Host Memory Buffer doesn't even come close making an impact on how long the larger 480GB model took, because The Destroyer simply moves too much data for a small cache to matter.

The average latency from the 480GB RC100 on The Destroyer is at least twice as high as that of other low-end NVMe SSDs, and the 240GB's latency is an order of magnitude worse. The situation for 99th percentile latency is even worse, leaving the RC100 looking bad even in comparison to most SATA SSDs.

The average read latency of the 480GB RC100 is a bit high but still within the normal range for most SSDs, but the 240GB stands out with more than twice the read latency. For writes, both capacities of the RC100 score poorly, and this is why the overall average tanked.

In spite of its DRAMless design, the 480GB RC100 manages a decent 99th percentile read latency score, but its smaller sibling can't control read latency under a workload this heavy. For writes, both capacities have very high 99th percentile latency, with the 240GB approaching a full second for its worst-case completion times.

The Toshiba RC100 uses relatively little power, but its poor performance means that the test runs long enough that total energy usage isn't great. The 240GB RC100's run of The Destroyer went on for longer than any other SSD tested in recent memory, leaving it with an energy usage score that looks more like what a desktop hard drive would produce.