Quick heads-up on a great SSD - Toshiba 128GB

[Arkaign]

I was at Micro Center today picking up some parts for a system for a customer whom I really like, and decided to go ahead and buy a new SSD for my HTPC and give him my old one as a free bonus (which is about 90 days old and has seen basically zero usage).

My main PC has raid 500GB 840 Pros, which is a tad bit of overkill, but works pretty well. My HTPC on the other hand had a Micro Center brand 120GB 'G3' SSD as the boot drive, and while it's of course way faster than a mechanical HDD, it never really seemed all that quick. My laptop's 840 Non-pro seemed to be much much faster despite a weaker CPU.

Well anyhow, the deal of the day apparently was the Toshiba 128GB 'DriveQ' Sata3 SSD for $89. I thought I'd give it a shot, $10 less OTD than the Samsung 840 non-pro 120GB.

Plopped it in, imaged over my HTPC SSD to the new Toshiba drive, and boom, this thing is FAST. Cranked my WEI from 7.5 to 7.9, boot times/shutdowns/program launches are noticeably faster, and reads now hit 550+ on Crystal, along with 505 writes. Pretty solid for a 128GB drive, and it arguably feels faster than the 840 non-pro in my laptop, but that's hard to quantify due to my HTPC having a much faster CPU/GPU.

Anyhow, that's it. Can't tell you much more than that, but it's far better than a 'cheap' SSD in performance. It easily rivals my experience with 840 non-pro and Vertex 4 drives.

 

[Soulkeeper]

Toshiba seems like a solid competitor.

I'd go as far as saying there are 3 main players on my radar going forward
samsung
crucial/micron + marvell
toshiba

 

[aigomorla]

the SSD's i usually pick in order..

1. Sandisk Extreme 2
2. Corsair nutronium
3. Samsung
4. Crucial
5. Intel.

In that order u cant go wrong..

Lately tho seems like the other guys are building solid SSD's..
Plextor for one also makes great SSD's... and now it seems like toshiba has good stats as well.

Any chance for a full AS SSD bench?

 

[KingFatty]

What controller does the Toshiba use? Is it marvell or sandforce or something else?

 

[=Wendy=]

A custom Marvell controller (N8B97202 4JW), with Toshiba 19nm Toggle NAND.
In the real world they are pretty fast.

 

[sequoia464]

A custom Marvell controller (N8B97202 4JW), with Toshiba 19nm Toggle NAND.
In the real world they are pretty fast.

Do you know if Toshiba is still working on their own controller?

 

[Arkaign]

the SSD's i usually pick in order..

1. Sandisk Extreme 2
2. Corsair nutronium
3. Samsung
4. Crucial
5. Intel.

In that order u cant go wrong..

Lately tho seems like the other guys are building solid SSD's..
Plextor for one also makes great SSD's... and now it seems like toshiba has good stats as well.

Any chance for a full AS SSD bench?

Sounds like a good list. Tell me where to get and how to run the AS SSD bench and I'll give it a shot if it would be helpful. I know 120/128 drives are usually a little slower than 250/256 drives, but it still feels really nice coming from the MC house-brand drive.

 

[Cerb]

http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/as_ssd_benchmark.html

 

[Hellhammer]

Do you know if Toshiba is still working on their own controller?

Toshiba has never had a fully in-house designed controller. Currently they use Marvell's and SandForce's silicons (though they could be custom) and in the past Toshiba has also used JMicron too.

 

[Cerb]

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Toshiba/THNSNH256GCST_256_GB/5.html

That sure looks like it. If so, it does test well, and appears to be a customized Marvell.

 

[Soulkeeper]

hmm no dram cache on that SSD ?

 

[Cerb]

Not as an external chip, at least. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if they have some on-package w/ the controller.

 

[Soulkeeper]

yeah, wore myself out trying to compare pictures with an ss9187 from google searches.

 

[Hellhammer]

hmm no dram cache on that SSD ?

You can get by with the integrated SRAM cache with efficient mapping table design, especially if you have access to the silicon. For example SandForce-based solutions have never required external DRAM.

 

[Cerb]

yeah, wore myself out trying to compare pictures with an ss9187 from google searches.

It's custom, and Toshiba isn't telling. It's a proprietary version of the controller, with a proprietary firmware. Toshiba is interested in marketing to companies like Lenovo and HP, not so much people like you and I, so they're not going and twisting it with marketing-speak and then distributing PPTs and PDFs full of any of the special stuff they use, except their own extra ECC.

Oh, and I also found a review at [H]: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/07/03/toshiba_thnsnh_256gb_ssd_review/8

 

[Arkaign]

Seems alright :

 

[Zap]

Oh, and I also found a review at [H]: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/07/03/toshiba_thnsnh_256gb_ssd_review/8

The Toshiba THNSNH gives us a peek into the world of OEM SSDs. OEM SSDs tend to focus on power consumption and reliability above all else, so we came away pleasantly surprised with the great performance of the Toshiba THNSNH SSD.

The THNSNH exhibited excellent steady state performance in our trace-based testing, coming the closest to dethroning the Samsung 840 Pro.

So, seems as if they don't care for the big numbers like many consumers look for when shopping, but have aimed for performance consistency and reliability. Very nice! Great find!

 

[OlafSicky]

Great find I had no idea Toshiba SSD were this fantastic. They are just hard to find.

 

[MontyAC]

Newegg has the 256gb one for $179. Decent price.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820168063

 

[Engineer]

Newegg has the 256gb one for $179. Decent price.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820168063

Use the V-Me coupon (10%) and you can get it for around $161 shipped.

 

[Arkaign]

Great find I had no idea Toshiba SSD were this fantastic. They are just hard to find.

Yeah I had no clue either, apparently they don't have a big retail presence. I just saw one in the case at MC and for ten bucks less than the 840NP thought it was worth a shot. Well worth it! My old MC house-brand drive is now happily churning along in my customer's system as a free upgrade for him, and he also couldn't be happier. His HDD, now moved to pure data duties (mapped all data folders inside his profile transparently to HDD), was a 500GB WD Blue, so even a relatively mediocre SSD is a massive upgrade for him.

This was the first time I've moved from SSD to SSD and felt the upgrade in everything. With the 840 Pro single to 840 Pro raid, most things were already so fast that I didn't notice. Only some things are a bit better, BF3 loads slightly, Photoshop with big RAWs, boot by a tiny amount. Of course, I am planning later on to de-raid them and use the 2nd for additional fast app access, but since I currently don't use more than 300GB in my boot drive, thought I'd give raid a shot. I could recommend it as a way to move the benches up, but not as a practical way to spend money unless you're later going to use it as a single drive.

 

[hot120]

Never understood (outside of fanatical benchmarking) why people get caught up in sequential numbers of SSD's. Unless you are writing to another SSD, you will NEVER see those 400+ Mbps transfer rates.

 

[sequoia464]

Toshiba has never had a fully in-house designed controller. Currently they use Marvell's and SandForce's silicons (though they could be custom) and in the past Toshiba has also used JMicron too.

Thanks, I appreciate the clarification; the reason I asked is because of this article ...

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5912/toshiba-announces-thnsnf-series-ssds-19nm-nand-is-here

I took this first article to mean that the controller is Toshiba's own, not a custom Marvell as this next article (and posts here) clarifiy.

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Toshiba/THNSNH512GCST_512_GB/

This article also comments on the lack of dram cache.

 

[Arkaign]

Never understood (outside of fanatical benchmarking) why people get caught up in sequential numbers of SSD's. Unless you are writing to another SSD, you will NEVER see those 400+ Mbps transfer rates.

Yeah who knows. The thing is that I moved from a drive that benched in the 260s to a drive in the ~500 range, and it made a TREMENDOUS difference in responsiveness. It went from 'snappy' to 'ohmygodthisrocks'. Boot time dropped by about a third, the time to wait for all the systray crap to populate halved, load times for applications is cut significantly, it's just a very noticeable improvement. I couldn't care less about what numbers the bench says, but for actual usability and response, it indeed made a very large improvement.

I think I actually will grab another pair of 840 Pro 512GBs to have a 1TB 'data' drive of decent speed to work with. This should work well with the 840 Pro raid OS/app setup in terms of lowering delays related to loading/copying/interacting with data.

For the HTPC, I think this 128GB Toshiba will be enough though.

 

[sequoia464]

Newegg has the 256gb one for $179. Decent price.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820168063

Newegg currently has an additional $15 off until the 21st.