The Toshiba/Kioxia BG4 1TB SSD Review: A Look At Your Next Laptop's 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.

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.