The Toshiba Q300 SSD Review: Toshiba Becomes a Retail Brand
by Billy Tallis on February 26, 2016 8:00 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - Heavy
Our Heavy storage benchmark is proportionally more write-heavy than The Destroyer, but much shorter overall. The total writes in the Heavy test aren't enough to fill the drive, so performance never drops down to steady state. This test is far more representative of a power user's day to day usage, and is heavily influenced by the drive's peak performance. The Heavy workload test details can be found here. This test is conducted twice, with the drive full and empty.
The Q300's average data rate on the ATSB Heavy test is the same as the Trion 100: low but not the worst we've seen, and about half what the Samsung 850 Pro delivers. All of the planar TLC drives perform worse than all of the MLC drives.
The Q300's average service time is again worse than the Trion 100, and is about twice that of the slowest MLC drive. The BX200 puts things in perspective: the Q300 is a disappointment, but isn't truly broken.
Most MLC drives are able to keep latency under 10ms almost all of the time, but the TLC drives get overwhelmed during the more intense parts of the test. The Q300 is worse than the Trion 100 480GB, but this time isn't worse than the smaller Trion 100.
The Q300 continues to be slightly more power efficient than the Trion 100, but the gap separating it from the MLC drives is quite clear. The SanDisk Ultra II managed to get much better efficiency out of nearly-identical TLC flash.
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cbjwthwm - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
Yes that quote in the review is out to lunch, this drive had the same problems as the Trion 100 with launching on flawed firmware 11.1, which had major reliability bugs--hence the bad user reviews like the Trion 100. Toshiba's link to the updated 11.2 firmware (from late November) is here:http://support.toshiba.com/support/viewContentDeta...
The reviewer needs to at least search for an updated firmware version before writing such oblivious comments that make his review seem very badly researched right off the mark.
serendip - Friday, February 26, 2016 - link
Big issue with the Q300 and its identical twin OCZ Trion 100 - they don't work with certain Nvidia chipsets, mainly those in Macbooks from 2010 and earlier. You can format the drive on a Macbook but read/write operations stall.OCZ are aware of the problem but have stated on their official forum that they can't do anything to avoid breaking support for newer chipsets. Toshiba haven't said a darn thing.
yuhong - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
Is there any more technical details like which part of the SATA protocol the problems comes from?serendip - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
No idea, maybe some power management issues? I've tried Sandforce and Samsung 850 Evo drives on those older Macbooks and they work fine. It's the new Toshiba controller that doesn't play well with MCP79/89 chipsets. OCZ have known about this for 3 months and have told customers facing this situation to get a refund and buy another drive whereas Toshiba are keeping silent. Guess that OCZ acquisition hasn't streamlined corporate lines of communication.Kristian Vättö - Sunday, February 28, 2016 - link
From what I've heard it's a problem Apple would have to fix through a firmware update. OCZ/Toshiba can't fix it, or at least not without massive changes. In the end it's a relatively small niche anyway.serendip - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
It happens only under OSX, all versions, on the Nvidia MCP chipset platform. The Q300 works fine in Windows on those affected Macbooks.cbjwthwm - Monday, March 7, 2016 - link
The nVidia SATA compatibility problem lies with the drive's Phison S10 controller, and it affects all products using that controller from various manufacturers such as Patriot, Corsair, and Kingston lines using it. Since Phison has been sitting on their hands with this issue for around a year a half (its first use was the Neutron XT iirc), I doubt they're going to get their act together for OCZ but I suppose we can hope?Harry Lloyd - Saturday, February 27, 2016 - link
Still waiting for a decent 500 GB drive under 100 $. Near the end of this year, maybe?dealcorn - Monday, February 29, 2016 - link
I understand that you can not test Devslp. Does Toshiba represent that the Q300 supports Devslp?watzupken - Monday, February 29, 2016 - link
For me, planar TLC will never fly, especially after the Samsung EVO 840 fiasco. The combination of TLC with shrinking NAND size is a perfect recipe for disaster, not to mention that they are not significantly cheaper than their MLC counterpart. There are MLC SSDs out there that run on lesser known controllers, but for some brands I feel its more reliable than the TLC+planar NAND combination.