The Toshiba XG6 1TB SSD Review: Our First 96-Layer 3D NAND SSD

AnandTech 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.