Toshiba Q Series Pro SSD Review (256GB) – Toshiba Pushes The SSD Price Bar Even Lower

TSSDR TEST BENCH AND PROTOCOL

SSD Testing at TSSDR differs slightly depending on whether we are looking at consumer or enterprise SSDs.  For consumer SSDs, our goal is to test in a system that has been optimized with our SSD Optimization Guide, although CPU C States have not been changed at all.  Benchmarks for consumer testing are also benchmarks with a fresh drive so, not only can we verify that manufacturer specifications are in line but also, so the consumer can replicate our tests to confirm that they have an SSD that is top-notch.  We even provide links to most of the benchmarks used in the report.

Enterprise testing is significantly different as we explore performance in steady state, explore drive latency, and do our best to follow SNIA test protocol.  For the Toshiba Q Series Pro SSD, it is intended to be marketed as a retail item so we are going to follow our typical consumer SSD testing protocol.

SYSTEM COMPONENTS

This new PCIe Test Bench build was the result of some great relationships and purchase; our appreciation goes to the below mentioned manufacturers for their support in our project.  Our choice of components is very narrow, in that, we choose only what we believe to be among the best available and links are provided to each that will assist in hardware pricing and availability, should the reader be interested in purchase.

PC CHASSIS:	Corsair Special Edition White Graphite 600T Mid-Tower
MOTHERBOARD:	Asus P8Z77-V Premium ATX Motherboard
CPU:	Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz Quad Core
CPU COOLER:	Corsair H100 High Performance Liquid
POWER SUPPLY:	OCZ 1000W Fatail1ty Series
SYSTEM COOLING:	be quiet Silent Wings 2 PC Fans
GRAPHICS CARD:	PNY GeForce GTX 680
MEMORY:	Crucial Ballistix Sport DDR3-1600Mhz Memory
KEYBOARD:	Corsair Vengeance K95 Mechanical Gaming Keyboard
MOUSE:	Corsair Vengeance M95 MMO/RTS Laser Mouse
ROUTER:	NetGear R6300 AC1750 Dual Band Gigabit WiFi Router
HBA	HighPoint RocketU 1144C 4 x USB 3.0 20Gb/s HBA

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BENCHMARK SOFTWARE

The software we will be using for today’s analysis is typical of many of our reviews and consists of ATTO Disk Benchmark, Crystal Disk Info, Crystal DiskMark, AS SSD, Anvil Storage Utilities, and PCMark Vantage.  In consumer reports, we prefer to test with easily accessible software that the consumer can obtain, and in many cases, we even provide links. Our selection of software allows each to build on the last and, also, to provide validation to results already obtained.

CRYSTAL DISK INFO VER 5.5.0

Crystal Disk Info provides some excellent information about the SSD itself to include its health, product information, ‘power on’ information as well as the characteristics of the SSD. We can see that the SSD is capable of TRIM as it is not grayed out as with AAM.

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.

Listed benchmarks are pretty much right on the money as we achieve ATTO high’s of 552MB/s read and 519MB/s write performance.  This is an excellent start and typical of what we also saw in Toshiba client tests.