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 - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Toshiba XG6 brings a healthy boost to the full-drive average data rate on the Heavy test, but only improves the empty drive test run performance by about 5% over the XG5. Toshiba is definitely starting to fall behind the fastest high-end drives on this test, but the XG6 is still comfortably ahead of most entry-level NVMe products and more than twice as fast as the Crucial MX500 SATA SSD.
The Toshiba XG6 brings very small regressions to the latency scores on the empty-drive test runs, but makes up for it with substantially improved average and 99th percentile latency when the Heavy test is run on a full drive.
The slight regression in average latency for the empty drive test runs comes from an increase in average write latency. Read latency has improved substantially and write latency for the full-drive test runs doesn't stand out for the XG6 the way it did for the XG5.
For 99th percentile latency, both read and write performance are slightly worse on the XG6 than the XG5 when the Heavy test is run on an empty drive. But full-drive latency QoS has improved markedly for both read and write operations.
The Toshiba XG6 uses slightly more energy over the course of the Heavy test than the XG5 does, when the test is run on an empty drive. The improved full-drive performance helps the XG6 come out ahead on energy usage for that test run. Either way, the XG6's efficiency is comparable to SATA drives and the WD Black is the only other high-end NVMe that offers this kind of power efficiency.
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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.