The Toshiba Q300 SSD Review: Toshiba Becomes a Retail Brand
by Billy Tallis on February 26, 2016 8:00 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 conducted twice, with the drive full and empty.
The Q300's average data rate on the ATSB Heavy test is the same as the Trion 100: low but not the worst we've seen, and about half what the Samsung 850 Pro delivers. All of the planar TLC drives perform worse than all of the MLC drives.
The Q300's average service time is again worse than the Trion 100, and is about twice that of the slowest MLC drive. The BX200 puts things in perspective: the Q300 is a disappointment, but isn't truly broken.
Most MLC drives are able to keep latency under 10ms almost all of the time, but the TLC drives get overwhelmed during the more intense parts of the test. The Q300 is worse than the Trion 100 480GB, but this time isn't worse than the smaller Trion 100.
The Q300 continues to be slightly more power efficient than the Trion 100, but the gap separating it from the MLC drives is quite clear. The SanDisk Ultra II managed to get much better efficiency out of nearly-identical TLC flash.
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bill.rookard - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
MX100's are awesome drives, I have a pair in my webserver with a M4 for the boot drive. Sadly, the whole issue appears to be (with the exception of Samsungs drives) the TLC. When having to account for the 8 different voltage states required for 3 bit per cell it seems that the controllers are not up to the task of getting things done quickly.I'm thinking widespread adoption of V-nand (regardless of manufacturer) along with MLC in a larger lithography will wind up being the perfect storm of capacity, price, speed and endurance.
Arnulf - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
TLC cells have 8 distinct voltage levels per cell to make up for 3 bits of information, not 3.hojnikb - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
thats what he said.kmmatney - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
No, he said 3, not 3vladx - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
"No, he said 3, not 3"Huh?
boozed - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
It's really quite simple. He said 3, not 3.extide - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
I think what we will see is 3D TLC in pretty much all mainstream stuff, and 3D MLC in the high performance stuff.Samus - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
It's too bad the MX100 and BX100 are harder and harder to find, when the MX200 and ESPECIALLY the BX200 are inferior.leexgx - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
the BX100 its perfect for laptops as its super power efficient, the MX100/BX100 is the most use the most power SSD (the Adata Sp550 also uses the BX200 controller)leexgx - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
ops!! MX200/B200 or any SSD that uses TLC with SLC cache seem to be extremely high power usage, for minimal overall speed boost (and higher chance of data loss due to SLC/TLC data movement)