The Toshiba RC100 SSD Review: Tiny Drive In A Big Market
by Billy Tallis on June 14, 2018 9:00 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.
Once again the 240GB Toshiba RC100 exhibits very poor performance overall when the drive is full, and the 480GB doesn't do particularly well in that situation either. But for the more typical case of running the Light test on a drive that isn't full, both RC100s are competitive with other low-end NVMe SSDs and much faster than SATA drives.
Most of the low-end NVMe SSDs show substantially higher latency when running the Light test on a full drive, so the RC100's results aren't quite as extreme an outlier. The RC100 is actually better off with HMB off for the full-drive runs of this test, possibly because the overhead of the extra PCIe communication isn't worthwhile when the cache isn't going to be of much use.
Average read and write latencies are both competitive for the RC100's empty-drive test runs, and the full-drive read latencies are high but aren't extreme outliers. It's the write latency that really causes problems for the RC100 when it is full.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores show similar results to the averages, but more prominently highlight the drives that are having trouble—which is mostly just the RC100, though the 600p's 99th percentile write latency is pretty bad, too.
The Toshiba RC100 doesn't quite manage to beat the Crucial MX500 SATA drive for energy usage on this test, but it's first-place among its NVMe competition for the empty-drive test runs, and isn't unreasonably power-hungry even when it is performing poorly.
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MadAd - Saturday, June 23, 2018 - link
+1Anyone can review a flagship release, this is real tech reporting.
Calin - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Yes, more people care about the low-mid end of the market than about the very high end - the M.2 2242 has multiple advantages (compact, doesn't need a 2.5 or 3.5 inch case location, doesn't need power cable, low power. Plenty of people will pay more for that, if the performance is equivalent (just as plenty of people pay more for pretty lights when the performance is equivalent, or pay more for a quiter component, or ...).So, while I'm not interested in M2 drives, thank you for the article :)
gnufied - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Actually I have been looking for a decent 2242 SSD since forever. My thinkpad T450s has a 2242 slot and we have very little options.Having said all this, I dunno if this is comptaible with thinkpad's 2242 slot.
timecop1818 - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
most likely not, as that slot is probably for USB-based LTE modem or similar device. M.2 spec does provide for USB connectivity on A, B and E keyed cards/sockets.gnufied - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
The 2242 slot defenitely can be used for M.2 SSDs. I am currently using https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B012ASBZEO/ref=o... SSD with my thinkpad and it works.Reading through R100 review does not fill me with joy though. This NVMe disk does not even look better than M500.. :(
Targon - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
M.2 has different flavors, and depending on the slot and device you plug into it, may use a SATA connection rather than NVMe with the dedicated PCI Express lanes. The 2242 is a measure of width and length, NOT the interface. An obvious way to tell is that if you have two notches on the connector, you are not looking at a NVMe connection, while the single notch will support the PCI Express lanes. At least, that is typically what is going on. With only two PCI Express lanes, without investigating, I suppose the two notches might still give you some NVMe, but I wouldn't be sure about that.Kwarkon - Friday, June 15, 2018 - link
There are NVME drives with two notches (M+B), but this keying is limited to only 2 PCIe lines.Jorgp2 - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I already ordered one, I'll try to send you a PM if it worksgnufied - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Nice. thank you. also do a crystal mark or something while you are at it. :-)close - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Because it's less than half the price so it has a better chance of ending up in a "regular machine" than the 970 Pro. Reviews for halo products are great but what do you think most people will have a $350 SSD or a $150 one?