Toshiba’s trio of contenders feature
homemade hardware
Toshiba’s previous drives had
incomprehensible names, but that’s changed with the new Q and Q Pro drives. The
former range is designed for mainstream use, and it’s here in its 256GB and
521GB guises. The latter is an enthusiast product, and we’ve reviewed the 256GB
version. One factor that hasn’t changed, though, is the firm’s reticence when
it comes to providing details about the insides. Both ranges include
Toshiba-made controllers, and the Pro drive’s chip is labelled TC358790XBG, but
that’s all we know about it.
Toshiba Q series 256GB $239.44 inc VAT
Both ranges also employ 19nm MLC
Toggle Mode NAND, which is made by Toshiba. Neither drive is especially
goodlooking, though, with plain metal enclosures and dull stickers. The
standard Q Series drives also use the portly 9.5mm form factor, while the Pro
drives are 7mm tall and include a 9.5mm spacer in the box.
Both of Toshiba’s 256GB drives return
238.47GB of formatted capacity and, strangely, the Pro model is the cheaper of
the pair – it costs $216.16 compared to the standard drive’s price of $237.78.
Meanwhile, the 512GB Q Series drive weighs in at $512.14. Warranties differ
between the two drive brands, however: standard Q Series drives have three-year
deals, and while the Pro drives are only shipped with two years’ worth of
support.
Toshiba Q series 512GB $512.14 inc VAT
There’s little difference between the
makeup of the Q and Q Pro series drives, which explains why the three were
often grouped together in our benchmark tables.
The standard Q Series 256GB was the
best of the three Toshiba drives in four of the six AS SSD benchmarks, but all
three Toshiba were inconsistent in these tests. The drives sat in mid-table for
sequential reads and writes, with scores north of 500MB/sec not far behind the
victorious Samsungs. They were also among the best performers in the random
64-queue-depth tests, but fell behind in the rest of AS SSD’s small file
benchmarks – in the 4KB random read test, the three Toshibas managed around
20MB/ sec, which can’t compete with the 40MB/sec of the table-topping Samsung
silicon.
We spotted the same trends in
CrystalDiskMark, with the standard 256GB Q Series drive leading the way, and
inconsistent performance throughout. Sequential reads and writes were
reasonable, but small file performance was uncompetitive – these drives were
bottom in the 4KB random read results, and occupied three out of the bottom
five positions when writing 4KB random files. Throughout all our testing, the Q
Series Pro was fastest when dealing with 32- and 64-queue-depth tasks.
Toshiba Q series Pro 256GB $216.16 inc
VAT
The three Toshiba drives stabilised in
real world tests, all returning good scores in PCMark 7 – only Samsung drives
could beat them in these tests, and it was Toshiba’s Q Pro SSD that was the
best performer out of these three, albeit by only a handful of points. The Q
Pro was also the best drive on test when it came to boot times, with a rapid
result of 11.49 seconds, and it was the fastest Toshiba drive in Iometer with
its 44,009 IOPS result too.
Conclusion
All three Toshiba drives had mixed
starts, with good sequential performance tempered by poor small file pace, but
real-world use proved that these SSDs still have enough pace to rival most of
the drives on test. They all offer reasonable value for money too, with prices
between 54p and 65p per gigabyte. The best deal is the Q Pro 256GB, though,
which just creeps ahead in performance and has a good price too.
Verdict
All three drives impress in real-world
tests, but it’s the Q Pro 256GB that takes home an award.
