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 - 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.
The average data rates delivered by the Toshiba XG6 on the Light test are similar to many other high-end NVMe SSDs though clearly lower than the fastest tier of drives. As with the Heavy test, the full-drive performance is the more significant improvement from the XG5.
Average latency from the XG6 has improved for both full and empty drive test runs, but the 99th percentile latency when the Light test is run on a freshly erased drive is actually worse than the XG5.
Average read latency doesn't vary much among high-end NVMe SSDs, though there are some outliers for full-drive read latency. The XG6 doesn't have the best scores, but the improvements the XG6 brings over the XG5 help ensure it doesn't stick out even among the newest and fastest competitors. For average write latency, the improvement in full-drive performance secures the XG6 a position in the high-end tier.
The 99th percentile read latency from the XG6 is typical for a high-end SSD when the Light test is run on an empty drive but a little high when the drive is full, though it's still improved over the XG5. The 99th percentile write latency regressed significantly for the empty-drive test run, back to the level of old high-end drives or current entry-level NVMe, but the full-drive 99th percentile write latency is excellent.
The energy used by the XG6 over the course of the Light test is barely different from that used by the XG5 or the WD Black. All three are slightly less efficient than the Crucial MX500 mainstream SATA drive and some of the more efficient entry-level NVMe 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.