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 - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Toshiba TR200 starts off in last place. At every capacity, the TR200's average data rate on The Destroyer is slower than the competition, including the HP S700, the only other DRAMless TLC SSD we've tested recently. The largest and fastest TR200 is as slow as the smallest model of its predecessor TR150.
The average latency from the TR200s is high for all three capacities, but only the larger two capacities are showing record high latencies for their size class. The 99th percentile latencies aren't quite as bad, especially with the larger capacities: the 960GB TR200 does a good job of keeping latency under control, the 480GB falls roughly in between the HP S700 and the rest of its competition, and the 240GB TR200 is tied with the HP S700 for last place.
Average read and write latencies are both high for the TR200, and much higher than with the predecessor TR150. It's unusual to see this much latency in the larger capacities, but the 240GB TR200 isn't an egregious outlier on these metrics.
The 99th percentile read latency of the TR200 is a small but clear improvement over the TR150, and the 960GB TR200 scores pretty well overall. On write operations, all capacities of the TR200 have poor QoS, with 99th percentile write latencies between a quarter and a third of a second. It's clear that the TR200 (and to a lesser extent the HP S700) suffer quite a bit from the lack of DRAM when the drive needs to perform garbage collection in parallel with handling new write operations.
Despite quite poor performance, the Toshiba TR200 returns decent energy usage results. The 960GB TR200 just barely sets a new record for lowest energy usage on The Destroyer, despite taking significantly longer to complete the test than its competition. Even the 240GB TR200 was much more efficient overall than all previous Trion/TR series drives, and used a third less energy than the 256GB ADATA SU800 (which was 27% faster).
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DanNeely - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
in other news the SATA3 bottleneck is still the SATA3 bottleneck.Faster drives are all PCIe based, so the odds of a SATA4 bumping it up again anytime soon are remote; especially since the SATA API/etc are a poor fit for SSDs and hurt performance a bit. If spinning rust remains relevant long enough for SATA to bottleneck again we might see a new standard revision in a few years; but by then the consumer SSD market will probably be all sticks.
Lord of the Bored - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
I honestly can't see hard disks going away completely any time soon. They're still much slower than flash, but flash isn't going to challenge them on the price per byte angle any time soon. 'S why I'm not pure silicon: I have an actual disk for data storage(particularly video files).The price advantage ALSO keeps them shipping in laptops, but the things going into lower-end laptops aren't exactly winning any races.
That said, the pressure for faster hard disks has definitely let up in the years since the first solid-state drives shipped. People trust a lot more of their data to remote servers than they did back then.
The main thing driving capacity increases at this point is commercial users(all that server-side storage moves the demands out of the home), so I don't see SATA3 being a hard disk bottleneck any time soon either. SAS may need an update at some point, though.
dave_the_nerd - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
That's the SATA3 bottleneck. If you want faster, you get a PCI-E drive.sonny73n - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
PCI-E will be the bottleneck soon in the future. For now, SATA3 serve me just fine. They don't slow my gaming or anything. Unless I transfer back and forth 10TB of my videos collection from one SATA3 drive to another every day, I don't see a reason to waste my money on soon-to-be obsolete tech.Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Having drives that can saturate a PCIe link doesn't mean that the PCIe link will be a meaningful bottleneck. We're getting to the point where latency matters far more than throughput (ie. flash vs. 3D XPoint), and aside from that, storage is usually less of a bottleneck than CPU and network and other components.jabber - Friday, October 13, 2017 - link
Indeed, the effect of a 200MB bit of software loading up on a 550 MBps SATA SSD and a 3000MBps NVME SSD are to all intents, identical to the human eye. Never has the promise of a 6 times jump in performance actually given so little.dromoxen - Tuesday, October 17, 2017 - link
550/540 IS the max of SATA 3 ssds .. the rest is lost in overhead and inefficiencys. Just like usb2 vs usb3 should be ten times faster , best I've ever got is 4x faster.heavy soil - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
The speed limit is SATA, the only way to be faster is PCIe (or I guess SAS).What has improved on the good SATA SSDs is the speed they deal with big queues, and coping with heavy writing too.
rocky12345 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Thanks for the look at the drive.So this is what dram less drives perform like? All I got to say is ouch those were some bad numbers from this drive. I have the Samsung EVO 850 Pro 512GB Sata drive still and my drive walks circles around this drive in every aspect. Yes my drive cost me a bit more but I have had it for like 2 years now and I am sure the cost of my drive has come down close to what this Toshiba drive now costs. If dram less drives perform like this then the cost to buy into them should be a lot lower than the higher end drives cost. Thanks again for the review your testing here is not flawed but this drive sure is.
Janis2017 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
That was stupid to give away 90 euro for product who only works 10 years 750evoI hope samsung firmware is ok. I dont need write protected drive.
I dont haw money for one more.