The Toshiba TR200 3D NAND SSD Review: One Step Forward, One Step Back
by Billy Tallis on October 11, 2017 7:00 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 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.
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HollyDOL - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Have to admit, 250GB is enough so far, but it's tight, my next SSD will be at least 500GB for sure.yankeeDDL - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
For XBONE and PS4 SSD make no sense, IMHO: you need large storage space, and speed is (nearly) irrelevant.At $89,99 you buy 3TB HDD (and some 4TB on discount) which will perform identically when connected via USB, but offer more than 10X the storage.
250GB SSD are nearly useless: just barely as a boot disk if the performance is "good", which it isn't in this case.
takeshi7 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
As someone who uses an SSD in their PS4 and Xbox One, I think it's worth it, but it definitely depends on the game. Forza and Elder Scrolls Online loads so much faster off of an SSD compared to a hard drive I've probably saved hours of loading screens. But in Destiny you have to wait for the servers and I've found an SSD doesn't cut as much time off of the loading screens.rrinker - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
My work laptop has a 500GB 850 EVO, but I also run VMs on it so I have single files that are 30GB. My new machine at home has a 500GB 850 EVO, just because. I don't game on that one, it doesn't even have a discrete video card, it's my workbench computer for electronics stuff, and the Arduino IDE and Visual Studio don't need discrete graphics. The 500GB is actually probbaly overkill, but it had been sitting on my desk for 5 months waiting for me to install it in my OTHER desktop. That one is an older machine but with a 970 it easily plays anything I play. Other than the video card, the machine is about 6 years old, originally built with a regular hard drive but then I upgraded it with a 250GB 830 EVO. It still has a spinny disk a D drive an the real space hog but not performance intensive things all go there, so so far the 250GB has been sufficient (hovers around 90GB free since upgrading to Win 10). I don't game a lot, and when I do I'm a serial gamer - one game at a time. When I get bored with that and move on to the next, I uninstall the old one.steve wilson - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Would that not be more of a monogamous gamer? I'm pretty much the same, I stick with one game most of the time, up until recently. PUBG and Rocket league now.rocky12345 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Yep you got a point the games are getting so big that 250-500GB space gets tight real fast. I have a 500GB SSD and 3 4TB drives in Raid 0+1 config which makes the mech drives perform very good. If I do find a game that takes a while to load up off of the 4TB drive config I just copy it to the SSD Drive and see very quick load times then. 2 games come to mind so far that I have done this with GTA V & Fallout 4. Both of those games see a huge boost in loading times shortened by doing this.Fallen Kell - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Just trying to figure out how you are using 3 drives to do a 0+1 RAID which clearly needs 4 drives to work... I mean I guess you could have created 2 partitions on each drive and then 0+1'ed the partitions and were extremely careful in the strip'ed mirror creations such that drive 1 has mirror of drive 3, drive 2 has mirror of drive 1, and drive 3 has mirror of drive 2...Again, just wondering.
rocky12345 - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Yea I just asked my friend who set it up and he said it was setup as Raid 01 hybrid 3 drive setup. He said yes 4 drives are much better for this setup. I asked him why he did not tell me this at the beginning his response "you never asked".the way he explained it was to picture it as with drive 1 with A1,A2,A3 Drive 2 with A1,A3,A4 Drive 3 with A2,A3 he even showed me a picture of this to make me see what he did and explained to me.
Now I am debating on just killing this raid setup and just making a Raid 0 config with 2 of the drive and have the third as a storage backup or picking up another 4TB drive and doing the proper configuration and not a non standard like I have now. He seems to think I should just leave it alone as it works well and the speed is good as it sits. Not sure what to do now I do not like having things done half fast...lol
rocky12345 - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
I just wanted to add reading your comment it looks like he may have set it up the way you said it could be done because he did say it was a bit tricky meshing it all together so it would work properly with the 3 drives only. If you think I should get a another 4TB drive and just have the raid configured again I am thinking that is the best option. I won't lose anything it is all backed up on externals anyways and whatever is not are just not worth backing up.Pork@III - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Sequential Read 555 MB/s 555 MB/s 555 MB/sSequential Write 540 MB/s 540 MB/s 540 MB/s
7 years long periood of same speed of ordinary SSD's