Conclusion, Pricing, and Final Thoughts
Conclusion
PROS
- Good to see more companies pushing the envelope with smaller SSD packages.
- Decent sequential performance given low power consumption.
CONS
- Moderate workloads were sufficient to overload the cache / impact performance.
Pricing, Endurance, and Warranty (MSRP)
- RC100
- 128GB – $59.99 ($0.50/GB)
240GB – $79.99 ($0.33/GB)
480GB – $154.99 ($0.32/GB)
- 128GB – $59.99 ($0.50/GB)
The Toshiba RC100 ships with a 3-year warranty. Pricing is in our opinion far too high given the current SSD landscape. While the PCIe interface helps the RC100 outpace SATA parts in raw sequentials, random performance was found to be lacking compared to competing PCIe 3.0 x2 parts and even other SATA products. Competing parts like the MyDigitalSSD SBX, Micron MX500, WD Blue / Sandisk Ultra 3D, and the even the Samsung 860 EVO offer similar or better performance at an equal or lower cost/GB. Quick searches online at the time of this writing show plenty of the above options running at $0.2x/GB or even $0.15/GB for something like the Micron 1100.
Final Thoughts
It's great to see Toshiba squeezing a PCIe NVMe SSD into an M.2 2242 form factor, especially a power efficient one, but with those efforts came some compromises in terms of the performance capabilities of this new RC100 product line. Sequential performance was competitive save some noted cache performance inconsistencies, and random write performance was also negatively impacted by the same. Despite our custom suite issuing a relatively lightweight 'bursty' workload, it appears that the RC100's perform their best when at a nearly empty / fresh-out-of-the-box condition, which is great for simple benchmarking but not so much in actual usage of the product. The above issues, combined with Toshiba's 'budget' pricing falling higher than other competing and higher performing products, means that I must recommend folks take a pass on this one until we see significantly lower prices or a performance improving firmware. One possible saving grace is that if you have a small form factor PC or laptop that calls for an M.2 2242 SSD, the RC100 appears to be the only retail product capable of offering PCIe 3.0 x2 speeds at such a small physical size.
Awe they are so cute baby SSD
Awe they are so cute baby SSD drives. There was no mention if these have cache or no cache. Well unless I missed it in the post some where. If they do not have cache then it is a no go even though these are budget parts I would expect some sort of cache on them. I have seen non cache drives and the performance is not good at all.
They use Host Memory Buffer
They use Host Memory Buffer in place of on-drive RAM.
There is SLC caching (SSDs do
There is SLC caching (SSDs do not typically cache data in RAM as that is reserved for FTL). These of course have no external DRAM but can share a small amount of memory from the host via NVMe 1.3 extensions.
Hopefully they have gotten
Hopefully they have gotten better at this because when the first generation SSD’s came out without onboard memory cache it really hurt performance of those drives.
I just read the review of
I just read the review of these drives over on Anandtech and it was a mixed bag for the results. In some tests the drive just kinda fell apart and performed very badly and in others it did well and in 1 test it actually lead the pack. For my own needs I do not think Dram-less SSDs are the way to go. To be worth it this drive and others like it need to be much much lower in price because you are not getting remotely close performance of the higher end drives but the prices for these types of drives do not really reflect the price to performance ratio.
I do think a drive like this would be great in a value laptop as long as they do not try to install the 120GB version that is I think 250GB-256GB should be the lowest size for any system and even then that is pushing the size limits but is workable at least.
A while back a customer of mine wanted a good but also cheaper gaming system. I got him a Acer Pred system but the thing only had a 256GB SSD (Dram-less)& a 2TB storage drive. I never knew SSD drives could feel so slow until I hit the power button and the system booted up and it felt like it was running on a standard spindle drive but in fact was running windows on the SSD. I did tests on the SSD and it got over 500MB’s read and 485MB’s writes.
So in theory it should have felt faster. The system had 16Gb DDR4 2600MHz memory and an i7 7700 so plenty of memory and CPU HP and a Geforce 1070 8GB. Yet it felt slow I come to find out it was a 256GB Dram-less drive and used host memory to cache.
At this point I swore off of dram-less drives for my own setups because my old Samsung 512Gb Pro Sata drive felt so much faster and does not have that feeling like everything is lagging and this is on an old i7 2600K@5.1GHz which should not be as peppy as a i7 7700 system.
Please review the EX920! 🙂
Please review the EX920! 🙂
Anyone make an x16 card with
Anyone make an x16 card with 8 x2 m.2?
Or an 8x pcie3 lane slot
Or an 8x pcie3 lane slot rigged as 16x pcie2 lane slot, w/ quad m.2 port adapter running 4x 4 lane nvme?
In theory e.g., an Apu, or an intel/am4 desktop pc w/ an 8 lane dgpu, could spare the lanes to run such an array?
How you get 2 lane m.2 ports on a PC is a mystery to me?
same price at the western
same price at the western digital. ill stick with WD, since toshiba still give people hell on returning items under warranty. not a company i want to continue buying from.
There are quite a few
There are quite a few business oriented laptops that have a regular m.2 2280 slot but if you look closely, also a 2nd m.2 2242 PCI-e only slot that is for a WAN/Cellular card.
I used that empty WAN slot to get two SSDs in a business class Dell laptop. Only had one option back than.
Just FYI, for anyone else wanting to add a bit of extra SSD storage to their laptop.
The problem is that most of
The problem is that most of the systems I have seen do not support anything other than the 2280 form factor when it comes to M.2. HP Omen, Sager, Clevo, MSI, Gigabyte and many others are this way from what I have seen.
Please be careful when you purchase a M.2 drive to be sure that your system supports that form factor. If you don’t, you often have something you cannot use, or face damaging the drive or your system.
Wonder if it’s the $3 saved
Wonder if it’s the $3 saved from no ram that’s causing
poor performance,or the combination of that and a c**p
controller…………..
Tosh’s lack of info on it’s controllers often has me
thinking it’s a Phison in disguise……