The Toshiba TR200 3D NAND SSD Review: One Step Forward, One Step Back

AnandTech 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 run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.

All three capacities of the Toshiba TR200 are at the bottom of the chart for average data rate on the Heavy test, falling just below their predecessors. However, the TR200 is somewhat redeemed by retaining a lot of its performance even when full. In that case, the TR200 compares favorably against the HP S700 (the other DRAMless TLC SSD on the graph), and against the smaller capacities of the ADATA SU800.

The average latency of the TR200 on the Heavy test is quite high for all capacities and whether the test is run on a full or empty drive. However, several other drives fare much worse when full.

When considering the 99th percentile latency, the 240GB TR200 stands out as having very poor QoS whether or not it is filled before running the Heavy test. The larger two models of the TR200 have rather high 99th percentile latencies, but don't fall too far outside the normal range. HP's S700 performs slightly worse when full, but even the 250GB model has decent control over latency when the test is run on an empty drive.

The average read and write latencies for the TR200 on the Heavy test stand out from the crowd. They're all slow, whether or not the drive is filled before running the test. There's not much variation between capacities and for both reads and writes the latencies are at least twice as high as most of the current competition. For reads, the TR200 is even worse than the ADATA SU800 and HP S700 at their worst, while for writes those drives have far higher latencies when full than the TR200.

The 99th percentile read latencies of the TR200 are on the high side, but are not even twice as high as the best MLC drives, when the test is run on an empty drive. The smaller TR200s do a bit worse when the drive starts out full, but so do many other budget SSDs, and the 960GB model is barely affected. On the write side of things, there's no contest. The 99th percentile write latencies of the 480GB and 960GB TR200 are almost a third of a second. The 240GB model's 99th percentile latency is half as bad, but it's still unprecedented among recent models to see latency that bad even when the test is run on an empty drive.

When the Heavy test is run on an empty drive, the TR200 doesn't break any energy efficiency records, but it is competitive with some of the most efficient drives. When the drives are full, the TR200 takes the lead, thanks to the relatively small performance drop they show in that scenario. The TR200 has managed to cut energy use almost in half compared to its predecessors.