The SSD Review The Worlds Dedicated SSD Education and Review Resource | 
POWER CONSUMPTION
For our power consumption testing, we have the drive connected to the system as a secondary drive. To record the wattage, we are now utilizing a Quarch Technology Programmable Power Module. It allows us to accurately measure power consumption over time and is flexible enough to allow us to test any SSD that comes our way.
When enterprise class storage is deployed, not only one or two drives are set out in a deployment, hundreds to thousands are, therefore, when booting a NAS or SAN it is important to ensure the power sources will be able to provide enough power to the systems. First we look at how much power the device needs during startup. Next we look at idle power consumption and workload averages at a QD of 32. This helps us gauge IOPS per Watt.
Our power analysis may change as time goes on, but for now we are looking at just a few metrics with the main goal of measuring our results against the manufacturer’s ratings.
Overall, we can see that power consumption is pretty well-regulated. As we are comparing smaller capacity drives to the Toshiba HK4R, it isn’t an apples to apples comparison, but it does show that the Toshiba and Samsung, though larger capacities, typically consume less power than the Micron across the board. Idle power consumption is better than the 1.2W spec and average consumption results are much better than the 4.5W active rating.
Now, looking at the IOPS per Watt under workloads we can see that the HK4R is very efficient, especially considering it is double the capacity of the PM863. In almost every test except for 4K read it is more efficient!
REPORT ANALYSIS AND FINAL THOUGHTS
The Toshiba HK4R’s performance in today’s review has been quite good to say the least. While it isn’t a stellar performer when it comes to random writes with ratings up to 14K IOPS, it was interesting to see how the TC-58 controller faired in our enterprise testing. As the results showed, it delivered performance that surpassed its rated specs and wound up being extremely competitive to the Samsung PM863 we reviewed last Fall.
Sequential read and write speeds easily reached their spec of 524MB/s and 503MB/s. Random 4K read hit over 93K IOPS and writes over 17K, both far over their rated value from Toshiba, which is always great to see. But, then again, this we need to remember that Toshiba also rates their drives at the end of the drive’s life, thus slightly better than rated performance is to be expected until then. When looking 8K performance the Samsung PM863 has a slight lead over the Toshiba HK4R, but it was still able to achieve a very respectable result of 56K IOPS read and 9K IOPS write at QD32. Furthermore, comparing our synthetic workloads, the HK4R continued to give the Samsung PM863 a run for its money at mid-range QDs, even with its lower IOPS rating. Consistency was very, very well controlled throughout our testing as well!
In addition, reviewing the power consumption results we can see that the HK4R has a great advantage over Micron’s M510DC and is decently ahead of the lower capacity Samsung PM863. Furthermore, we can see a much greater difference when looking at the IOPS per Watt results, where the HK4R absolutely destroys the competition in nearly all metrics tested.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Overall, we are impressed with the Toshiba HK4R’s performance, efficiency, and especially it’s consistency. The HK4R is a solid enterprise class SATA SSD designed for read centric applications such as streaming and file sharing. This was especially apparent when looking at the max latency results during our SNIA testing where its max latency results in 100% reads absolutely trumped its mixed and 100% write workload results.
The Toshiba HK4R comes with all the standard enterprise class features you could want in a 2.5″ 7mm form factor. Power-loss protection, end-to-end data path protection is included, and SED options are even available. Their QSBC ECC even helps to prevent data corruption and thus, improves reliability and extends drive life. With capacities of 120GB-1.92TB available and depending on the price you can get them for, the Toshiba HK4R may wind up being a great deal for your next deployment. Be sure to give it a good look, because we award the Toshiba HK4R our Gold Seal!