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

[Hellhammer]

The 2nd article linked seems to state that while it recovers, it only recovers to half of its' original performance in random writes (unlike OCZ which does eventually recover to 100% full speed).

Could be that Toshiba is just limiting the 4KB random write speed at high queue depths to avoid fragmenting the drive more. In other words, there's likely fairly aggressive GC going on if you're writing that kind of data to the drive, which slows down the host IO requests.

Just a theory that came to my mind. Shouldn't be a big deal because consumer workloads usually stay within QDs of 1 and 5.

By the way, have you (or are you) going to get a chance to review this series of drives in the future?

The Strontium Hawk I reviewed (linked above) is a rebranded Toshiba drive (even has the Toshiba sticker on the back), so I'm not sure there's a need to review the same drive once. If Toshiba releases new drives, then I'll definitely try to get my hands on one.

 

[Engineer]

The Strontium Hawk I reviewed (linked above) is a rebranded Toshiba drive (even has the Toshiba sticker on the back), so I'm not sure there's a need to review the same drive once. If Toshiba releases new drives, then I'll definitely try to get my hands on one.

Great. I'm going to read it!

For some reason, I thought that the link you posted was about OCZ. Now I realize what you're talking about and thanks for a GREAT review (no sucking up here), especially the section that shows the difference between default and 25% overprovisioning (I assume that's what that section is).

 

[wiz329]

256GB available for $150 on Newegg today. Order on mobile using promo code MBLMOBILE10 to save an additional 10%

Total price: $135.

Hard to beat.

 

[code65536]

The Strontium Hawk I reviewed (linked above) is a rebranded Toshiba drive (even has the Toshiba sticker on the back), so I'm not sure there's a need to review the same drive once. If Toshiba releases new drives, then I'll definitely try to get my hands on one.

Could you please change the title of the article (and/or its entry in Bench) so that it says something like "Strontium Hawk (Toshiba THNSNH)"? Or better yet, create a duplicate entry in Bench that says "Toshiba Q-Series 256GB (Strontium Hawk rebadge)"?

I always turn to AT for SSD reviews, but when I bought my Toshiba THNSNH, I couldn't find an article for it, and I couldn't find it in Bench. I've never seen a Stronium on sale before, but I've seen a few Toshibas, so I suspect that there are more people looking for info on the Toshiba than there are looking for the Strontium, and that most people who read the Strontium review are doing it for the Toshiba info.

(I ended up buying it anyway, but it would've made my decision so much easier if I could've found this info at Anandtech.)

 

[aigomorla]

No, it didn't. 550MBps is about your max read speed. 2800MB/550MBps = 5 seconds. If it takes much less than that, you're not copying from the SSD. Do the same at 500MBps for writes.

Did you turn off Superfetch, and reboot between file operations, to make sure it was a cold copy?

That 1.5 seconds was to copy the <1GB of the file that wasn't already in your cache, not the whole file. The majority of it was already in your RAM.

i dont think a cold copy is possible from RAMDISK...
can u correct me Cerb?

cuz Ramdisk is the upper register in RAM hence why its in RAM hence why he has the 7k IO numbers on a 6GB/S IO Cap on a PCH.

MV-3V4G3D-US_DDR3 1867 Mhz 9-9-9-24 1T RAMDisk Drive Vs Samsung 840 Pro 256 SSD

 

[Cerb]

i dont think a cold copy is possible from RAMDISK...
can u correct me Cerb?

Cold copy to, no. Initial filling of the RAMdisk itself may very well have been enough to leave the cache warm. Only with a cold boot, with Superfetch disabled, a new blank RAMdisk, that file not having been opened, yet, and then monitoring storage IO, rather than the copy dialog, will you be sure to get reasonably accurate results...hence why programs like CDM, AS-SSD, and ATTO come in handy, doing that kind of work for you. In Windows, you'd need to use a program that performs unbuffered IO to find the speed of going from RAMdisk to SSD, on the file copy, as well.

It may very well have taken 3 seconds and 1.5 seconds, if using Windows' normal Explorer copy, since with regular mounting, the data doesn't have to be written to the device before it goes away. And, that is, overall, a good thing in new Windows versions (not the copy dialog and time--that's just MS not fixing things that aren't costing them money--but the caching), but it does make it more of a chore to get accurate speed results than just a little file copying/moving.

 

[Kallogan]

Toshiba Q series goes pro :
http://www.custompcreview.com/reviews/toshiba-q-series-256gb-ssd-hdts225xzsta-review/18983/

Insanely low power consumption