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  • r3loaded - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Pwned by an 850 Evo but only $10 cheaper. Yay what a surprise.
  • ddriver - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Cudos to toshiba for making an ssd that is as slow in sequential writes as a mechanical hdd. I can't imagine it was easy.

    It's a serious contender for "lousiest sata ssd of 2017".
  • masouth - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    of just 2017?
  • takeshi7 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    correction: slower than an hdd in sequential writes. But then again a lot of these cheap TLC drives have lower sustained write speed than HDDs. What really amazes me is that Toshiba actually made an SSD that's worse than the Crucial BX200. I never thought that would be possible.
  • Samus - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    At 1/10th the power consumption though. As hard as it is to defend this drive, it’s clear toshiba had a very specific goal in mind with this drive: cheap upgrades for cheap laptops. As an OEM supplier for many vendors (including even Apple) this drive is adequate for many sub-$500 laptops: being dramless makes power loss protection mostly unnecessary as it will likely recover from sram loss inside the controller, as the indirection table is mirrored off then back to the nand after each write.

    However, I’ve never been a fan of dramless controllers. Seams like a mind boggling corner to cut when the cost of 512mb DDR3 is $4.
  • Lolimaster - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Fact is Crucial MX300 is as cheap and way better, my way way way better,
  • Samus - Sunday, October 15, 2017 - link

    I've long stood by that assertion. Crucial and Samsung SSD's are the only mainstream drives worth considering. Sure, Sandisk, Intel, even Mushkin have their niche products, but Samsung and Crucial have no real "duds."
  • Flunk - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Has Anandtech reviewed another budget SSD that's competitive with the 850 Evo, seems like that's the gold standard at the moment. I just bought one for my Mom for Christmas.
  • theramenman - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    The SanDisk Ultra 3D they reviewed a bit ago gets similar performance to a 850 Evo for $43 less (at least for the 1TB version).
  • sonny73n - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    3 most valued SSD models currently on Amazon. One of them is the BX300 with capacity max out at 480GB which I can only compare it to the similar of the other 2.

    - Samsung 850 Evo 500GB $160
    - SanDisk Ultra 3D 500GB $170
    - Crucial BX300 480GB $145

    The first 2 are made of TLC NAND and the BX300 is made of MLC. No brainer to pick the best one here.
  • lmcd - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    Isn't BX300 NVMe? Or is it SATA? 850 Evo might be the best "compatibility" option if the former.
  • mapesdhs - Friday, October 13, 2017 - link

    Curiously though, the 850 EVO still has a very good reputation. But for the price, it would be my default recommendation.
  • sonny73n - Saturday, October 14, 2017 - link

    All three are SATA3.
  • takeshi7 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Anandtech reviewed the Crucial BX300 and it seems very good.
  • Samus - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    BX300 is the only competitive drive at the moment (mostly on price) but older MX200’s can occasionally be found cheap and they have the capacity advantage.
  • sonny73n - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    Are you capable of using the search function on AT?
  • Ratman6161 - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    Seriously dude, your mom densest want an SSD for Christmas.
  • HollyDOL - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Hm, with given price the performance is really poor... Unless you absolutely need to cut power requirements down in mW scale for some reason, I can't imagine it being a good choice.
  • Valantar - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    If this does indeed signal the beginning of the end of the NAND shortage, that is more than welcome. If that happens, I also hope we see significant reductions below MSRP for this over time, to the tune of i being noticeably cheaper than DRAM-equipped drives. In the next year, I want cheap 250-500GB SSDs for my XBONE and PS4, and DRAM-less drives should fit that bill nicely (the USB interface will limit them already, so I don't see the value of springing for anything above bargain-basement as long as it significantly outperforms an HDD).
  • nathanddrews - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    With 100GB games already shipping, will 250-500GB cut it anymore?
  • HollyDOL - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Have to admit, 250GB is enough so far, but it's tight, my next SSD will be at least 500GB for sure.
  • yankeeDDL - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    For XBONE and PS4 SSD make no sense, IMHO: you need large storage space, and speed is (nearly) irrelevant.
    At $89,99 you buy 3TB HDD (and some 4TB on discount) which will perform identically when connected via USB, but offer more than 10X the storage.
    250GB SSD are nearly useless: just barely as a boot disk if the performance is "good", which it isn't in this case.
  • takeshi7 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    As someone who uses an SSD in their PS4 and Xbox One, I think it's worth it, but it definitely depends on the game. Forza and Elder Scrolls Online loads so much faster off of an SSD compared to a hard drive I've probably saved hours of loading screens. But in Destiny you have to wait for the servers and I've found an SSD doesn't cut as much time off of the loading screens.
  • rrinker - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    My work laptop has a 500GB 850 EVO, but I also run VMs on it so I have single files that are 30GB. My new machine at home has a 500GB 850 EVO, just because. I don't game on that one, it doesn't even have a discrete video card, it's my workbench computer for electronics stuff, and the Arduino IDE and Visual Studio don't need discrete graphics. The 500GB is actually probbaly overkill, but it had been sitting on my desk for 5 months waiting for me to install it in my OTHER desktop. That one is an older machine but with a 970 it easily plays anything I play. Other than the video card, the machine is about 6 years old, originally built with a regular hard drive but then I upgraded it with a 250GB 830 EVO. It still has a spinny disk a D drive an the real space hog but not performance intensive things all go there, so so far the 250GB has been sufficient (hovers around 90GB free since upgrading to Win 10). I don't game a lot, and when I do I'm a serial gamer - one game at a time. When I get bored with that and move on to the next, I uninstall the old one.
  • steve wilson - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    Would that not be more of a monogamous gamer? I'm pretty much the same, I stick with one game most of the time, up until recently. PUBG and Rocket league now.
  • rocky12345 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Yep you got a point the games are getting so big that 250-500GB space gets tight real fast. I have a 500GB SSD and 3 4TB drives in Raid 0+1 config which makes the mech drives perform very good. If I do find a game that takes a while to load up off of the 4TB drive config I just copy it to the SSD Drive and see very quick load times then. 2 games come to mind so far that I have done this with GTA V & Fallout 4. Both of those games see a huge boost in loading times shortened by doing this.
  • Fallen Kell - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    Just trying to figure out how you are using 3 drives to do a 0+1 RAID which clearly needs 4 drives to work... I mean I guess you could have created 2 partitions on each drive and then 0+1'ed the partitions and were extremely careful in the strip'ed mirror creations such that drive 1 has mirror of drive 3, drive 2 has mirror of drive 1, and drive 3 has mirror of drive 2...

    Again, just wondering.
  • rocky12345 - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    Yea I just asked my friend who set it up and he said it was setup as Raid 01 hybrid 3 drive setup. He said yes 4 drives are much better for this setup. I asked him why he did not tell me this at the beginning his response "you never asked".

    the way he explained it was to picture it as with drive 1 with A1,A2,A3 Drive 2 with A1,A3,A4 Drive 3 with A2,A3 he even showed me a picture of this to make me see what he did and explained to me.

    Now I am debating on just killing this raid setup and just making a Raid 0 config with 2 of the drive and have the third as a storage backup or picking up another 4TB drive and doing the proper configuration and not a non standard like I have now. He seems to think I should just leave it alone as it works well and the speed is good as it sits. Not sure what to do now I do not like having things done half fast...lol
  • rocky12345 - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    I just wanted to add reading your comment it looks like he may have set it up the way you said it could be done because he did say it was a bit tricky meshing it all together so it would work properly with the 3 drives only. If you think I should get a another 4TB drive and just have the raid configured again I am thinking that is the best option. I won't lose anything it is all backed up on externals anyways and whatever is not are just not worth backing up.
  • Pork@III - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Sequential Read 555 MB/s 555 MB/s 555 MB/s
    Sequential Write 540 MB/s 540 MB/s 540 MB/s
    7 years long periood of same speed of ordinary SSD's
  • DanNeely - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    in other news the SATA3 bottleneck is still the SATA3 bottleneck.

    Faster drives are all PCIe based, so the odds of a SATA4 bumping it up again anytime soon are remote; especially since the SATA API/etc are a poor fit for SSDs and hurt performance a bit. If spinning rust remains relevant long enough for SATA to bottleneck again we might see a new standard revision in a few years; but by then the consumer SSD market will probably be all sticks.
  • Lord of the Bored - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    I honestly can't see hard disks going away completely any time soon. They're still much slower than flash, but flash isn't going to challenge them on the price per byte angle any time soon. 'S why I'm not pure silicon: I have an actual disk for data storage(particularly video files).

    The price advantage ALSO keeps them shipping in laptops, but the things going into lower-end laptops aren't exactly winning any races.

    That said, the pressure for faster hard disks has definitely let up in the years since the first solid-state drives shipped. People trust a lot more of their data to remote servers than they did back then.
    The main thing driving capacity increases at this point is commercial users(all that server-side storage moves the demands out of the home), so I don't see SATA3 being a hard disk bottleneck any time soon either. SAS may need an update at some point, though.
  • dave_the_nerd - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    That's the SATA3 bottleneck. If you want faster, you get a PCI-E drive.
  • sonny73n - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    PCI-E will be the bottleneck soon in the future. For now, SATA3 serve me just fine. They don't slow my gaming or anything. Unless I transfer back and forth 10TB of my videos collection from one SATA3 drive to another every day, I don't see a reason to waste my money on soon-to-be obsolete tech.
  • Billy Tallis - Thursday, October 12, 2017 - link

    Having drives that can saturate a PCIe link doesn't mean that the PCIe link will be a meaningful bottleneck. We're getting to the point where latency matters far more than throughput (ie. flash vs. 3D XPoint), and aside from that, storage is usually less of a bottleneck than CPU and network and other components.
  • jabber - Friday, October 13, 2017 - link

    Indeed, the effect of a 200MB bit of software loading up on a 550 MBps SATA SSD and a 3000MBps NVME SSD are to all intents, identical to the human eye. Never has the promise of a 6 times jump in performance actually given so little.
  • dromoxen - Tuesday, October 17, 2017 - link

    550/540 IS the max of SATA 3 ssds .. the rest is lost in overhead and inefficiencys. Just like usb2 vs usb3 should be ten times faster , best I've ever got is 4x faster.
  • heavy soil - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    The speed limit is SATA, the only way to be faster is PCIe (or I guess SAS).
    What has improved on the good SATA SSDs is the speed they deal with big queues, and coping with heavy writing too.
  • rocky12345 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    Thanks for the look at the drive.

    So this is what dram less drives perform like? All I got to say is ouch those were some bad numbers from this drive. I have the Samsung EVO 850 Pro 512GB Sata drive still and my drive walks circles around this drive in every aspect. Yes my drive cost me a bit more but I have had it for like 2 years now and I am sure the cost of my drive has come down close to what this Toshiba drive now costs. If dram less drives perform like this then the cost to buy into them should be a lot lower than the higher end drives cost. Thanks again for the review your testing here is not flawed but this drive sure is.
  • Janis2017 - Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - link

    That was stupid to give away 90 euro for product who only works 10 years 750evo
    I hope samsung firmware is ok. I dont need write protected drive.
    I dont haw money for one more.
  • 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

    IKR

    I 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.

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