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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Mikewind Dale - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Interesting review. Thanks.I'm hoping that smaller, 11" and 13" laptops will start offering M.2 2242 instead of eMMC. I've been wary of purchasing a smaller laptop because I'm afraid that if the NAND ever reaches its lifespan, the laptop will be dead, with no way to replace the storage. An M.2 2242 would solve that problem.
PeachNCream - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Boot options in the BIOS may allow you to select USB or SD as an option in the event that a modern eMMC system suffers from a soldered on drive failure. In that case, it's still possible to boot from an OS and use the computer. In that case, I'd go for some sort of lightweight Linux OS for performance reasons, but even a full distro works okay on USB 3.0 and up. SD is a slower option, but you may not want your OS drive to protrude from the side of the computer. Admittedly, that's a sort of cumbersome solution to keeping a low-budget PC alive when replacement costs aren't usually that high.peevee - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
"but this is only on platforms with properly working PCIe power management, which doesn't include most desktops"Billy, could you please elaborate on this?
artifex - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Yeah, I'd also like to hear more about this.Billy Tallis - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I've never encountered a desktop motherboard that had PCIe ASPM on by default, so at most it's a feature for power users and OEMs that actually care about power management. I've seen numerous motherboards that didn't even have the option of enabling PCIe ASPM, but the trend from more recent products seems to be toward exposing the necessary controls. Among boards that do let you fully enable ASPM, it's still possible for using it to expose bugs with peripherals that breaks things—sometimes the peripheral in question is a SSD. The only way I'm able to get low-power idle measurements out of PCIe SSDs on the current testbed is to tell Linux to ignore what the motherboard firmware says and force PCIe ASPM on, but this doesn't work for everything. Without some pretty sensitive power measurement equipment, it's almost impossible for an ordinary desktop user to know if their PCIe SSD is actually achieving the <10mW idle power that most drives advertise.peevee - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
So by "properly working" you mean "on by default in BIOS"? Or there are actual implementation bugs in some Intel or AMD CPUs or chipsets?Billy Tallis - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Implementation bugs seem to be primarily a problem with peripheral devices (including peripherals integrated on the motherboard), which is why motherboard manufacturers are often justified in having ASPM off by default or entirely unavailable.AdditionalPylons - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
That's very interesting. And thanks Billy for a nice review! I too appreciate you doing something different. There will unfortunately always be someone angry on the Internet.Kwarkon - Friday, June 15, 2018 - link
L1.2 is a special PCIe link state that requires hardware CLREQ signal. When L1.2 is active all communication on PCIe is down thus both host and NVME device do not have to listen for data.Desktops don't have this signal ( it is grounded), so even if you tell the SSD (NVME admin commands) that L1.2 support is enabled it will still not be able to negotiate it.
In most cases m.2 NVME require certain PCIe link state to get lowest power for their Power State.
The PS x are just states that if all conditions are met than the SSD will get its power down to somewhere around stated value.
You can always check tech specs of the NVME. If in fact low power is supported than the lowest power will be stated as "deep sleep L1.2 " or similar.
Death666Angel - Saturday, June 16, 2018 - link
Prices in Germany do not line up one bit with the last chart. :D The HP EX920 1TB is 335€ and the ADATA SX8200 960GB is 290€. The SBX just has a weird amazon.de reseller who sells the 512GB version for 200€. The 970 Evo 1TB is 330€ and the Intel 760p 1TB is 352€. And for completeness, the WD Black 1TB is 365€. Even when accounting for exchange rates and VAT, the relative prices are nowhere near the US ones. :)