The Toshiba RC100 SSD Review: Tiny Drive In A Big Market
by Billy Tallis on June 14, 2018 9:00 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.
The ATSB Heavy test is small enough to reveal some impact from the HMB feature: it clearly makes a big difference to full-drive performance for the 480GB model, and slightly improves empty-drive data rates for both capacities. The 240GB falls apart when full, leading to data rates that are inexcusably bad.
The average and 99th percentile latencies from the RC100 are reasonable when the test is run on an empty drive. For the 480GB model, HMB keeps both latency scores from getting out of control even when the drive is full, but the 240GB model has serious issues with or without HMB.
For both average read latency and average write latency, the 480GB RC100's scores with HMB enabled are competitive with the drives that have onboard DRAM. Disabling HMB makes write latency especially stand out when the 480GB model is full.
The 99th percentile read and write latency scores for the 480GB RC100 are great when HMB is enabled and acceptable without it. The 240GB model also performs reasonably when the drive is not full.
The power efficiency of the RC100 is generally quite good, except when the 240GB model is full and takes forever to finish the test. The HMB feature is particularly helpful for the 480GB RC100, allowing it to complete the full-drive test using barely more energy than the empty-drive run.
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XabanakFanatik - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Seriously? We get this instead of the 970 Pro or 905p review? Did anyone actually care about this drive?Billy Tallis - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Personally, I find doing a review like this to be a lot more interesting than testing an overpriced flagship product where I know going into it that the conclusion will be that a drive 1/2 or 2/3 the price is just as good for realistic use cases. It's interesting to explore the current state of the art for high-end tech, but it's more interesting to explore new tech in the context of something that might also be a sane purchase.XabanakFanatik - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I'm not sure how interest explains why you've reviewed this two days after it shipped but 7 weeks after you posted the 970 Evo review, there is no 970 pro review. Every other inferior review website posted the pro and evo reviews simultaneously, so Samsung must have sent you both drives around the same time.And Seriously, this is more interesting than reviewing the first optane refresh 905p?
close - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
They're usually very late with most reviews. Except Intel ones.Ostensibly because they want to provide the best information out there.
Samus - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Need a review of a 970 Pro? Read the 970 Evo review and assume it’s moar better for proportionately moar money.bananaforscale - Monday, July 9, 2018 - link
Not proportionately. Flagship products *never* have a price that's proportional to performance.artifex - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
You already know a bazillion other sources for a 970 Evo review, so you're beating this guy up for being different? He says doing this review is more interesting for him, so no wonder he did it.Also, since you're calling Anandtech an inferior review site, he's hardly likely to change just for you, now.
XabanakFanatik - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I was saying every other review site was inferior, yet they posted 970 PRO reviews the same time as 970 EVO reviews. My issue with Anandtech was the sole posting of the 970 EVO review and no 970 PRO review now for over 7 weeks.Nobody tests like Anandtech. I'm sad that the halo drives aren't a priority for Billy, since the market for them is actually really big.
lmcd - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
Most people I know look at the 970 EVO as the highest price drive they'll consider. I almost didn't even consider it.XabanakFanatik - Thursday, June 14, 2018 - link
I can think of a half dozen people I know that would have never considered the 900 Pro drive at the previous price point that bought one after Samsung's mysterious price drop at launch of the 970 series. Lopping off 20-25% of MSRP tends to work pretty well to sell a new generation that was previously priced too high.