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 - 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.
The short duration and low write volume of our Light test don't help the Toshiba TR200 look any better than it did on the harder ATSB tests. The average data rates from the TR200s when the test is run on an empty drive are slower than most other SSDs when completely full. The HP S700 still does worse when full, as does the 256GB ADATA SU800. The Samsung 850 EVO is about twice as fast overall on the Light test.
The average latency of the TR200s on the Light test falls well outside the normally narrow range. A few other drives have exceptionally high latency when the test is run on a full drive, but otherwise nothing comes close to the TR200. By contrast, the 99th percentile latency of the TR200 is only modestly worse than other low-end drives, and the TR200 doesn't get massively worse when it is full.
The TR200 has some of the highest average read latency scores on the Light test, but it's not a serious outlier at any capacity. The average write latency is where the TR200's problems lie, as even the fastest 960GB model has twice the write latency of the next slowest drive.
The 99th percentile read latency scores of the TR200 are a modest improvement over its predecessors, and in line with contemporary competitors. The 99th percentile write latency is worse than the TR150 but not high enough to be a problem on this light workload.
The DRAMless SSDs are again the most energy-efficient despite their lower overall performance. The TR200 loses to the HP S700 when the test is run on an empty drive, but the TR200 takes a clear lead when the drives are full, using less than three quarters the energy of the next most efficient SATA drive.
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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.