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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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.