Toshiba XG6 1TB SSD Review

1. Introduction2. Toshiba XG6 1TB3. Testing Methodology4. CrystalDiskMark5. ATTO Disk Benchmark6. AS SSD7. IOMETER8. 128KB Sequential Performance9. 4K Random Read v QD Performance10. 4K Random Write v QD Performance11. 4K 70/30 Mixed Performance12. Throughput13. PCMark 8 - Storage Consistency14. PCMark 8 - Individual Test Suites15. PCMark 8 Storage Test - Individual Test Suites16. Performance Stability17. Real Life File Testing18. Closing Thoughts19. View All Pages

Toshiba's XG6 M.2 NVMe drive has been designed for the OEM market, destined to be installed into performance laptops, desktop and gaming PCs. Toshiba also envisage the drive being used as boot drives in servers, caching and logging, and commodity storage in datacenters.

The most important facet of the drive is the NAND it uses, namely Toshiba's latest 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND. The XG6 is first SSD launched using this type of flash. With 96-layers enabling 512Gbit dies, the new NAND offers a 40% increase in capacity over the previous generation of Toshiba 64-layer NAND. It also supports the Toggle 3.0 standards which boosts the interface speed from the 400 – 533 MT/s of Toggle 2.0 up to 667 – 800MT/s.

Performance wise Toshiba quote Sequential figures for the 1TB XG6 of up to 3,180MB/s for reads and up to 3,000MB/s for writes. Using the ATTO benchmark we were able to confirm those figures with the review drive producing a read figure of 3,255MB/s and writes of 3,026MB/s. With our own 128KB Sequential tests the drive produced peak figures of 3,253.88MB/s and 3,188.37MB/s for reads and writes respectively.

The random performance of the drive is quoted as up to 355,000 IOPS for reads and 365,000 IOPS for writes. Under testing the best random read figure we got from the drive was 349,840 IOPS, a little short of that maximum figure. Writes on the other hand fell way short of the maximum figure, the best we got from testing was 237,449 IOPS.

The XG6 is currently an OEM product at the moment so it may well turn up in the next notebook you buy. It will, in all probability form the basis of the next generation of Toshiba NVMe drives to hit the market and the NAND itself, no doubt will be seen in other SSD's in the very near future.

Pros

• 96-Layer 3D TLC NAND.
• Overall performance.

Cons

• OEM drive only at the time of writing.

Kitguru says: Although the XG6 is an OEM part at present, we are pretty sure it will form the basis of the next series of retail consumer NVMe SSDs that Toshiba will roll out.

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