The Toshiba XG5 (1TB) SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on August 3, 2017 9:01 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 run twice, once on a freshly erased drive and once after filling the drive with sequential writes.
The Toshiba XG5's average data rate on the Heavy test is not quite competitive with the Samsung 960 EVO and also trails behind Toshiba's OCZ RD400, but it ties or beats several MLC SSDs and fares far better than the WD Black and Intel 600p. The XG5 does suffer a relatively large performance hit when the test is run on a full drive, but even in that case it is still substantially faster than the SSDs that it beats when the test is run on an empty drive.
When the Heavy test is run on an empty drive, the XG5's average and 99th percentile latency are just shy of Samsung's NVMe SSDs and ahead of the Intel SSD 750. When the test is run on a full drive the latencies are increased significantly, but this still leaves the XG5 ahead of the slowest MLC-based NVMe SSDs.
Separating the average read and write latencies shows that the XG5 performs well with both types of operation. The full-drive penalty affects writes more than reads, but the overall wider spread of write latencies means the XG5 still isn't close to the bottom of the charts for that test.
The 99th percentile read latencies show one of the XG5's greatest strengths with a clear advantage over Samsung's best SSD when the test is run on an empty drive, but the full-drive penalty is acute and pushes the 99th percentile latency 2.5 times higher. The Samsung 960 EVO performs poorly here with scores worse than most MLC NVMe SSDs and just ahead of the Intel 600p.
The 99th percentile write latencies paint a very different picture. Only a few drives have trouble keeping write latency under control, and the XG5 clearly isn't one of them, even when full.
The Toshiba XG5's energy usage on the Heavy test is again much better than any previous PCIe SSD. There's a clear increase in energy consumption when the test is run on a full drive, but the effect is much smaller than the performance impact and is not enough to knock the XG5 out of first place.
For context, the energy usage of the XG5 is on par with the most efficient SATA SSDs based on planar TLC, but is not competitive with SATA SSDs using MLC or 3D NAND. Those SATA results are not shown here because they were recorded on our earlier 2015 testbed running Windows 8.1, but they should be quite similar to how those drives will perform on the new 2017 testbed.
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Hurr Durr - Friday, August 4, 2017 - link
Honey, Samsung IS South Korea.Kristian Vättö - Thursday, August 3, 2017 - link
Look at it from the other perspective. If it wasn't for Samsung, companies like Apple, Dell, HP etc. would barely have any product to sell. The US hasn't been strong in memory for decades and even today Micron is still just a drop in the ocean from overall wafer production point of view.Samus - Thursday, August 3, 2017 - link
Indeed.Santoval - Friday, August 4, 2017 - link
I think you are swimming in conspiracy theory waters. Since there is no legal way to target Samsung specifically, the only way for what you are suggesting is by slapping heavy tariffs on South Korean imports in the US. But that is a dangerous slippery slope, since it could be the start of a global tit-for-tat tariff war. Now, I do not say that Trump is not crazy or stupid enough to not go there, but I still do not think he will do it, because hopefully cooler heads will prevail. If he does the US will be completely isolated, and since it is a major part of the global economy, the 2008 - 2010 crisis will seem like peanuts.Reflex - Thursday, August 3, 2017 - link
Don't bother asking him that, it'll just turn into conspiracy theory bullshit.Ratman6161 - Monday, August 7, 2017 - link
This is the second AT story I've read today where the comments devolved into a flame war within the first page. If everyone would just stop feeding the trolls I think things would be a lot better. As it is, the comments area is rapidly reaching uselessness.cfenton - Thursday, August 3, 2017 - link
They would have to undercut the 500GB EVO by $75-$100 and the 1TB by $100-$150, at least, to make this thing compelling. Though, to be honest, I haven't noticed a huge difference going from a BX100 to a 960 EVO in everyday performance. It's certainly better for demanding tasks, but that's not important for a lot of people.Sivar - Thursday, August 3, 2017 - link
The technical detail and comprehensiveness of this SSD review is impressive.It must have taken man weeks to put this all together.
Billy Tallis - Thursday, August 3, 2017 - link
It did take quite a while to put together the new test suite, and re-test older drives for comparison data. The Intel 750 is a particular nuisance since I only have equipment to measure one power rail at a time and the 750 uses both the 12V and 3.3V lines.Now that I have the new test suite (mostly) complete and automated as much as possible, I hope to be able to churn out reviews more quickly. There will be another SSD review going up next week while I'm at Flash Memory Summit.
Ratman6161 - Monday, August 7, 2017 - link
AT is my go to place for SSD reviews. I like the consistent testing procedures over time which really helps to do apples to apples comparisons. One thing I' would like to see though is more comparisons of different sized drives in the same brand/model family.For example I was recently shopping for an NVMe drive and Samsung has been my go to brand for a few years now for high-mid range with crucial for my more run of the mill drives. So of course I was considering the 960 EVO. The trouble was I didn't need or want to pay the price for a 1 TB model (have a 750GB MX300 for bigish storage)...the 256GB was more in my price range. But you only usually have results for the 1 TB model. Digging around on other sites I was able to determine that the 256GB model took a huge performance hit compared to the larger sizes. In the past, Samsung drives used to seem like they took less of a hit when down sizing capacity, which was another plus for the brand. I ended up with a 512 GB Evo as a good balance between price and performance...but there were a lot of guesswork and assumptions involved with that choice.
I can't be the only one out there that thinks this way?