Toshiba Portege Z830 13.3″ Ultrabook Laptop Review – Toshiba Creates One Amazing SSD Ultrabook!

TOSHIBA INCLUDES A SOLID STATE DRIVE

All Z Series models contain Toshibas own 128GB solid state drive and this ultraportable is as affordable as it can be solely because of this. A bit dissappointing perhaps, but typical of Ultrabooks other than only a few that we know of, is the fact that the new Ultrabook generation is capable of faster SATA 3 storage speeds yet all Ultabooks don’t automatically support SATA 3 as of yet. As well, the only to include a SATA 3 SSD as standard is the Zenbook which utilizes the A-Data mSATA with a SandForce SF-2281 processor.

For our purposes, we have installed a Runcore T50 120GB SATA 3 SSD which boasts speeds up to the 500MB/s threshold just as the Zenbook does. On our initial installation, the system would not exceed SATA 2 speeds, however, in our tests today, all seemed to fall into place and full SATA 3 speeds are shown. We will supply benchmarks below, all of which were conducted while each was installed in the Z830, and a very important point should be recognized when viewing the results.

The observed upgrade from a hard drive to a solid state drive is seen in the incredible access speed of the SSD which is about 90 times faster than a hard drive.  The  user will observe no difference between either drive in ‘typical user activities’ and, for the most part, these speeds will only be realized through large file transfers or user specific tasks that demand much more of the SSD.  For the time being, however, I felt it only fair to provide the units original benchmarks (SATA 2) in comparison to that of the SSD I am presently using which is a Runcore T50 120GB SATA 3 mSATA SSD similar to that we had originally reviewed earlier this year.

BENCHMARKS

For these benchmarks, I was taken aback by the Toshiba results and, for that reason, elected to test the Toshiba 128GB SSD in our desktop system where I found that its results were marginally better than in the laptop.  All Runcore T50 tests have been conducted while in the Portege Z830.

ATTO DISK BENCHMARK VER. 2.46

ATTO Disk Benchmark is perhaps one of the oldest benchmarks going and is definitely the main staple for manufacturer performance specifications. ATTO uses RAW or compressible data and, for our benchmarks, we use a set length of 256mb and test both the read and write performance of various transfer sizes ranging from 0.5 to 8192kb. Manufacturers prefer this method of testing as it deals with raw (compressible) data rather than random (includes incompressible data) which, although more realistic, results in lower performance results.

RUNCORE T50 120GB SATA 3 SSD

TOSHIBA SATA 2 128GB SSD