Toshiba OCZ RD400 NVMe PCIe SSD 512GB Review

The RD400 is the first Toshiba-OCZ branded SSD to hit the market and is also Toshiba's first NVMe PCIe consumer drive. The flagship 1TB model has another claim to fame as the first 1TB class NVMe M.2 drive aimed at the consumer space. Although the RD400 is Toshiba's first NVMe drive for the consumer market, they have been using the technology for a while in the enterprise space. The PCIe Gen 3 x4 NVMe 1.1b compliant drive is available as either a M.2 2280 standalone drive or mounted in a PCIe Half Height, Half Length (HHHL) add in-card rather like Kingston's HyperX Predator. As well as the flagship 1TB model, the RD400 will also be available in 128GB, 256GB and 512GB capacities. The combination of controller, NAND and cache that the drive uses first saw the light of day as the Toshiba XG3, an OEM M.2 drive which turns up now and again in some ultrabooks. With the combination of NVMe architecture and a PCIe Gen 3 x4 interface the RD400 promises to be a bit quick, just how quick? Well the official sequential read/write figures for the drive are up 2.6GB/s and 1.6GB/s respectively with 4K random read/write performance of up to 210,000 IOPS for reads and 140,000 IOPS for writes. Endurance for the 512GB drive is quoted at 296TB TBW. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 1TB, 512GB, 256GB, 128GB. NAND Components: Toshiba 15mn Toggle MLC. Interface: PCIe Gen 3 x4 Form Factor: M2 2280/add-in card. NAND Controller: Toshiba. Dimensions: HHHL card 157.64 x 105.51 x 17.2mm Drive Weight: 70.2g Firmware Version 1.02 The front of the box has an image of the RD400, its capacity and the fact that it's a NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) drive. The rear of the box lists what's in the box, a few facts about the drive and some marketing blurb. There's not a lot in the box apart from the drive, just a half height bracket and some contact information about Toshiba's technical support and RMA departments. The HHHL (Half-Height, Half Length) add-in card version allows those who have motherboards without a M.2 PCIe x4 port on-board to still be able to use the drive as it fits in any PCIe x4 and above slot. The M.2 2280 drive layout is simplicity itself with all the components laid out on one side of the PCB. The controller is a proprietary Toshiba 4-channel PCIe NVMe chip coded TC58NCP070GSB while the two 256GB NAND packages are Toshiba 15mn Toggle MLC coded TH58TFT1JFL-BAEG. Rounding up the IC's is a Samsung LPDDR3 chip used for cache duties. The new SSD Utility replaces the old OCZ SSD Guru and is one of the more comprehensive SSD toolbox utilities around. With it you can how the drives capacity is being used, which interface the card is using and how much longer life the drive has left and SMART information. There's a tuner section which has a built in benchmark and adjustment for over provisioning of the drive. The maintenance section is where you find the to0ls for firmware updates, Secure Erasing and any drive alerts such as power loss or over heating. Booting from a NVMe SSD is a bit easier than it used to be, well it is if you have a UEFI BIOS that supports NVMe but even then they may some tinkering to be done in the BIOS. Windows 8.1 and 10 have built-in NVMe support and although the Windows NVMe driver is gradually improving, to get the best performance out of the RD400 its best to use Toshiba's own driver. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: Intel Core i7 4790K with 16GB of DDR3-2133 RAM, Sapphire HD7750 Ultimate and an ASRock Extreme 6 motherboard. Other drives Kingston HyperX Predator 480GB OCZ RevoDrive 350 480GB OCZ RevoDrive 3 x2 480GB Plextor M6e Black Edition PCIe 256GB Samsung SSD950 PRO 256GB Samsung SM951 256GB Samsung XP941 512GB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark. CrystalMark 3.0.3. AS SSD. IOMeter All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. Crystalmark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using V3.0.3. Apart from the extremely impressive sequential read/write speeds, the RD400 also handles deeper queue depths without any problems. At normal desktop queue depths the 4K random write 223.1MB/s is again very impressive but unfortunately the same can't be said for the read performance which is only on par with the faster standard 6Gb/s SATA SSD's. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. When it comes to outright performance the RD400 is the new king of the hill. Samsung's SSD950 PRO is a stunningly quick drive but even this is left in the dust by Toshiba OCZ's latest drive. It surpasses the official figures for sequential reads of up to 2,600MB/s at 2,704MB/s while the write figures produced by the drive under test matched the official figure of 1,600MB/s. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. The Toshiba controller has no real problems dealing with the incompressible data that AS SSD benchmark uses. Once again the drive excels at deeper queue depths. Also impressive is the 4K write performance. IOMeter is another open source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on hard drive and solid state drive technology. We test with both random read and write 4k tests, as shown above. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable. Toshiba OCZ quote random 4K read/write figures for the 512GB drive at up to 190,000 IOPS and 120,000 IOPS respectively but even these spectacular figures seem a more than a bit conservative as under test conditions the drive we have managed 172,358 IOPS for writes and a colossal 237,178 IOPS for reads. Simply stunning performance. To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of .png, raw and .jpeg images). 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files). As you might expect the RD400 has no problems at all with data transfers to and from it. Writing a 60GB Steam folder to it took a mere 1m 46s and just over two minutes to copy it back. The choice of two formats for the drive is a good move on Toshiba OCZ's part as not everyone has an up-to-date motherboard with a M.2 PCI-E x4 port built in, so the add-in HHHL card option which fits into any x4 PCI-E slot enables the drive to reach a much larger audience. The sequential performance of the drive is stunning at 2,704MB/s for reads and 1,600MB/s for writes and the random 4K performance at fairly deep queue depths is equally impressive. At shallow queue depths more in tune with desktop use the 4K random write performance is much more impressive than the read, which shows no real improvement over a performance SATA interfaced Solid State Drive. When it comes to IOPS, the RD400 again shows an amazing turn of speed. The official figures for the 512GB drive are eye popping enough at up to 190,000 IOPS and 120,000 IOPS for read and writes respectively but under test conditions using the IOMeter benchmark even these figures seem tame as the drive produced a figure of 172,358 IOPS for writes and a staggering 237,178 IOPS for reads. The RD400 shows the potential of the combination of both NVMe and the PCIe interface. Its very early days for the technology in the consumer market space with the prospect of some incredibly fast and it must be said large capacity drives to come in the future. Toshiba OCZ back the RD400 with a 5 year warranty under the Advanced Warranty service, a warranty scheme previously known as ShieldPlus. The basic M.2 2280 RD400 512GB (RVD400-M22280-512G) has a MSRP of £219.99 and the AIC version (RVD400-M22280-512G-A) as reviewed is priced at £259.99. If retailers shave a few quid off those prices then Samsung's SSD950 will find itself with some serious competition. Pros Stunning performance. Choice of drive formats. SSD Utility. Cons Needs UEFI BIOS and NVMe motherboard support to be bootable. 4K random read performance at shallow queue depths. Kitguru says: The future for performance SSD's may well lie in the combination of NVMe/PCIe technologies and Toshiba OCZ's RD400 drive is a perfect example of why.