The Toshiba XG6 1TB SSD Review: Our First 96-Layer 3D NAND SSD
by Billy Tallis on September 6, 2018 8:15 AM ESTAnandTech 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 Toshiba XG6 is slightly faster than the XG5 on The Destroyer. It still trails behind the fastest retail SSDs but at twice the speed of a mainstream SATA drive it's well into high-end territory.
Average and 99th percentile latency have both improved for the XG6, bringing it even closer to the top of the charts and leaving only a small handful of drives that score better.
The average read latency for the XG6 is only slightly better than the XG5, which was the slowest drive in the high-end tier. For average write latency, the XG6 represents a much more substantial improvement that puts it ahead of almost every other TLC-based drive.
The XG5 already had very good QoS with 99th percentile read and write latencies that were quite low. The XG6 improves on both counts, with writes particularly improving.
The total energy usage of the XG6 over the course of The Destroyer is very slightly higher than what the XG5 required, but this tiny efficiency sacrifice is easily justified by the performance increases. Toshiba's XG series remains one of the few options for a high-performance NVMe SSD with power efficiency that is comparable to mainstream SATA drives.
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DanNeely - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link
As long as the tests are the same, you can always pull the comparisons up yourself in Bench.While I sympathize with wanting them in the article tables, 3 or 6 years of historical low/mid/high end SSDs would end up either eating a lot of the tables reducing the number of current drives listed or making them much longer, so I fully understand why very little of that data is in the main tables.
wumpus - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link
DRAM buffer isn't mentioned but board has 4 chips on it, two are obviously flash chips, one is the Toshiba controller and one is by Nanya, a DRAM manufacturer. The kicker is that as an OEM part, the final customer has no way of telling if that chip is populated before purchase (and the lack of specs make it easier to leave it off).Hopefully if these make it to the open market we can at least tell if they have the DRAM or not. Note that some of the cheaper NVMes (think ADATA XPG 6000) seem to do fine without DRAM, but they are priced to compete with SATA, not other NVMes.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link
No XG6-based OEM drive is going to be DRAMless. Toshiba has the BG series for that purpose, with an entirely different controller.wumpus - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link
Really? Then who took that photo? Is the board in the photo the board that you reviewed? That board clearly has this chip on it:http://www.nanya.com/en/Product/4228/NT6CL128M32CM...
That's a 4Gb (512MB) LPDDR3 DRAM chip. Don't tell me that the board in the photograph doesn't have DRAM. They might not ship DRAM with the OEM devices, but that doesn't mean they didn't give you a SSD with DRAM to review.
MrSpadge - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link
He did not say"No, XG6-based OEM drive is going to be DRAMless",
just
"No XG6-based OEM drive is going to be DRAMless."
i.e. none of these drives will be DRAMless.
wumpus - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link
My eyes are going. Should I go get a monitor with less dot pitch or get a mac where it doesn't force dot pitch to the monitor size? Decisions, decisions.Commas are just to small for modern monitors. I was planing on getting higher dot pitch, but now I'm wondering.
Valantar - Friday, September 7, 2018 - link
I doubt a different monitor would help if your eyes are inserting punctuation where there is none - missing it when it's there is another matter. Besides, the fact that the sentence with an inserted comma doesn't add up grammatically should have tipped you off.Walkeer - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link
testing ssd performance on intel plaform is like testing race slicks tires on a child paddle car. Intel I/O performance went down by tens of percents with all the meltdown/spectre mitigations. please use AMD plaform insteadMrSpadge - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link
Usually they keep testing environments consistent for 1-2 years exactly due to such changing software conditions. It could well be that the next test suite will feature AMD CPUs and, as always, yield results not strictly comparable to the older ones.29a - Thursday, September 6, 2018 - link
If that was the case they wouldn't use the spectre/md patches.