The new Toshiba TR200 series of three drives (240GB, 480GB and 960GB) are the first retail Toshiba drives to appear using the company's 64-layer 3D TLC BiCS NAND and have been designed to offer a competitive price/performance point for the entry/value end of the market.
With the TR200 series being the only new SATA based drive series to be launched by Toshiba and eventually the only SATA based SSD product line they will offer, the company are seemingly firmly committed to NVMe for future releases in all market segments. Eventually the TR200 will take over from the current TL100, TR150, A100 and Q300 product lines.
Toshiba OCZ quote sequential performance figures for the 960GB version of the drive as up to 550MB/s and 540MB/s for read and writes respectively. Using the ATTO benchmark we confirmed those figures with a read score of 563MB/s, a bit better than the official figure while the writes were bang on the money at 544MB/s.
The random 4K IOPS test performance is a bit of a mixed bag. When it comes to 4K random reads the drive produced a score of 100,457 IOPS which blitzed the official 81,000 IOPS figure. Writes on the other hand went the other way, the best we could get from the drive was 65,054 IOPS, some way short of the maximum 88,000 IOPS quoted by Toshiba.
The SSD Utility management software has all the tools you need to maintain the drive and keep it updated. With it update the firmware and set the over-provisioning level. That’s in addition to keeping an eye on the drive’s lifespan, capacity usage and temperature.
The 960GB version of the TR200 retails at £252.99 (inc VAT).
Pros
- Overall performance.
- Price.
Cons
- Write performance is disappointing in some of our tests.
- 3 year warranty is a bit mean.
Kitguru says: Toshiba's latest SSD, aimed at the entry level end of the market performs well and its been competitively priced to give it a chance in a cut-throat market segment.
This is a very nice 850 Evo/Pro competitor, but it’ll come down to price and benchmarks.