The Toshiba XG5 (1TB) SSD Review
by Billy Tallis on August 3, 2017 9:01 AM ESTAnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer
The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.
We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average and 99th percentile latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.
The Toshiba XG5's average data rate on The Destroyer isn't fast enough to compete with Samsung's drives, but it beats some of the slower MLC-based PCIe SSDs and is much faster than the other (non-Samsung) TLC SSDs.
The average latency of the XG5 on The Destroyer is slower than the top NVMe SSDs including the Samsung 960 EVO, but the XG5's performance is still decent. The TLC-based WD Black and Intel 600p have average latencies that are several times higher. The 99th percentile latency of the Toshiba XG5 is very good, with a third-place score that beats all of Samsung's SSDs.
The drive rankings for average read and write latencies are very similar, with the Toshiba XG5 scoring in the middle of the pack on both measures. The overall spread of scores is very different: while the XG5's average read latency is only 25% slower than the fastest SSD and is essentially tied with the Samsung 960 EVO, its average write latency is almost 3.5 times worse than the fastest drive.
The 99th percentile latency scores of the XG5 are great for a TLC SSD. The write latency places the XG5 in the top tier of drives, while its read score is better than average among a widely varying bunch. The Intel SSD 750 is the only drive that offers better 99th percentile latency for both read and write operations.
Only a handful of drives have ever completed The Destroyer while using less energy than the Toshiba XG5. Most of those were SM2246EN-based SATA drives, and a few other SATA SSDs. The Crucial MX300 and Intel 545s are the only other TLC SSDs with this kind of efficiency. None of the other NVMe SSDs come close; the fastest competitors sacrifice power efficiency to obtain that performance, and the slower NVMe SSDs waste too much power operating a PCIe link that they can't fully utilize.
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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?