The Toshiba/Kioxia BG4 1TB SSD Review: A Look At Your Next Laptop's SSD
by Billy Tallis on October 18, 2019 11:30 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.
With the Light test, the Toshiba/Kioxia BG4 is back to outperforming its predecessors, but it isn't providing a challenge to most of the high-end drives. The full-drive performance of the BG4 is better than most entry-level drives and beats some high-end drives.
The 99th percentile latency from the BG4 during the Light test is much higher when the test is run on a full drive, but the disparity is nowhere near as large as for most of the other entry-level NVMe drives. The average latency scores are all better than the mainstream SATA drive.
The average read and write latencies from the BG4 during the Light test are both fine. The writes are more clearly slower than high-end drives, but are still quick enough to have minimal effect on perceived performance.
The 99th percentile read and write latencies for the BG4 on the Light test both show considerably higher latency for the full-drive test runs, but the latency doesn't get completely out of control. Worst-case write latency ends up only a little bit slower than the Crucial MX500.
The BG4 again stands out with much better energy efficiency than the rest of the drives in this bunch, providing a clear improvement over the earlier RC100 thanks primarily to much higher performance.
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eek2121 - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
There are a few 4 TB m.2 SSDs out there, they just sell out FAST so you typically won't even find them listed. You can still find plenty of 2 TB m.2 SSDs.mxnerd - Saturday, October 19, 2019 - link
Kioxia? Great product but what a bad brand name.s.yu - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
No surprise coming from Japanese manufacturers recently........s.yu - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
Looks like the takeaway from this is although Toshiba SSDs consistently fall behind Samsungs (the main reason they're regarded as the short straw in flash lottery), they may be more efficient, but hardly anybody tests for that.discostrings - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
The Toshiba BG4 is actually already available in the M.2 2242 format in retail channels as the Sabrent SB-1342-2TB, SB-1342-1TB, and SB-1342-512:https://www.sabrent.com/product/SB-1342-2TB
Yes, that's right: there's a 2TB 2242 variant! I was hesitant to believe it was actually available in that capacity, as I didn't see any sort of announcement, but I received one on Thursday and I can confirm it's quite real.
Unfortunately, these aren't useful for most current laptops with 2242 slots (that are primarily included for WWAN but which can also use NVMe drives like the RC100). As these SSDs use four PCIe lanes, they require the M key, while all laptops that I know of direct two (or less) PCIe lanes to the 2242 slot, and thus have a B key that prevents use of these drives.
So there probably won't be much of a market for these until there are laptops out with M-keyed M.2 2242 slots. It would be great to see a 2-lane variant with a B key in the short term for use in current laptops.
discostrings - Sunday, October 20, 2019 - link
I mixed terminology up a little bit in my prior post. The Sabrent drives use Toshiba BiCS4 NAND (which is also used by in the Toshiba BG4), but these are not rebranded variants of the same drive. Apologies for any confusion.peevee - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
So they already have brands Toshiba, Lite-On and Plextor, all pretty valuable and respectable (esp Plextor I think), why do they feel like they need another one?Billy Tallis - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
The decision to rebrand from Toshiba to Kioxia was made before the decision to buy Lite-On's SSD business. Continuing to use the Toshiba brand name long-term isn't an option since they aren't part of the Toshiba conglomerate anymore and need to IPO under a name they own. They don't get to use the Lite-On name either because they didn't buy the whole company, just the SSD portion. They might now own the Plextor brand.Targon - Monday, October 21, 2019 - link
If the laptop maker has a decent design, then it would make more sense to go with a small capacity SSD to keep the laptop price down and then put a better SSD in yourself. Get something with a normal 1TB hard drive but has the support for NVMe, and you then throw in a 1TB drive yourself. No need to feed the stupidity of people wanting a tiny machine that has a slow processor just to keep power demands low. Going with even a 35 or 45 watt CPU with a 15 inch display will give you a much more powerful laptop than these 15W CPU machines with a 11 inch screen designed for people who sit in meetings all day but have much lower performance.At least we are beyond the days of Intel Atom crap machines in that space.
MykeM - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
You can actually get a external USB-C SSD that uses this particular Toshiba BG4 SSD. It’s made by CalDigit know for its excellent Thunderbolt 3 docks. It’s called Tuff Nano and at the moment only comes in the ½ terabyte capacity. The read speed is just over 1GB/s (if the device USB-C supports USB3.x Gen2). And it’s tiny:l:https://www.caldigit.com/tuff-nano