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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theniller - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Why is this shit still a thing? The process node is there the stacking is there. Where is my 500 GB slc drive?lilmoe - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
IKRI already pay double for my drives work 50% over provisioning. SLC would cost me the same yet dramatically improve QD1 performance and endurance.
And they say there's no market for that. BS.
cekim - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Engineering you might expect from a company going out of business during the biggest supply shortage we've seen in PC parts in quite some time. Why god why?Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link
Toshiba's NAND division isn't going out of business; it's thriving. The nuclear power part of Toshiba is just failing so hard that Toshiba as a whole is deeply in the red.mapesdhs - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
Way slower and more expensive than an 850 EVO was 2 years ago. *yawn* This race to the bottom re performance/endurance is annoying.I wish the charts would include a couple of older models so so we can really see whether this tech has actually moved on or not, eg. an 840 Pro (wonderful MLC), Vector, Vertex4, Neutron GTX - all of these were already being bottlenecked by the SATA3 limit when the 840 Pro was reviewed on AT 5 years ago. Are these Toshiba models any better than what Samsung/OCZ was back then? The last time I saw it included, the Vector inparticular still looked pretty good. As long as this lack of performance/endurance continues, I just keep hunting for lightly used 840 Pros, etc. Bagged another 256GB recently for 51 UKP.
I miss the days when the 850 EVO 250GB was 53 UKP, everything has become so expensive since then, and not just SSDs. Prices of most RAM types has doubled.
Billy Tallis - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link
I've tested almost all of the older SSDs that I have on hand. Some of the older ones have died, or been transferred to other AT editors for use as boot drives. There are a few old drives I have in active use on various systems that I can clone then run through the test suite (a SandForce drive, a Crucial MX100, a Samsung 840 Pro) when time permits. Fortunately, my testing backlog is almost gone, so I may be able to get some of those drives added to the Bench database later this month.mapesdhs - Friday, October 13, 2017 - link
That would be great Billy, thanks!! 8)Btw, have you seen the article on techreport where they tested a bunch of SSDs to death? The 840 Pro was the final one to go, after it had written an astonishing 2.4PB. IIRC I can't link to other sites directly here, so just search for, "The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead", the piece is written by Geoff Gasior.
artifex - Thursday, October 19, 2017 - link
I know an anecdote is not data, but my Samsung 830, 128GB is still going after about 5 years. Magician says it's pushed 20TB. It's actually still my gaming OS drive, too.Question, though: how come I hear nothing about the 750s, now? Did that line get dropped quickly? I got one in a sale last year, and I hope they're not terrible.
yifu - Monday, November 20, 2017 - link
is this the most power efficient SSD in the market today? I have missed the BX100, Now I can not find it anymore.