Toshiba XG5 NVMe SSD Review: Strong Performance With 64-Layer BiCS 3D Flash

Our Test Methodologies: Under each test condition, the Solid State Drives tested here were installed as secondary volumes in our testbed, with a separate drive used for the OS and benchmark installations. Out testbed's motherboard was updated with the latest BIOS available at the time of publication and AHCI (or RAID) mode was enabled.

The SSDs were secure erased prior to testing, and left blank without partitions for some tests, while others required them to be partitioned and formatted, as is the case with the ATTO, PCMark, and CrystalDiskMark benchmark tests. Windows firewall, automatic updates and screen savers were all disabled before testing and Quiet Hours was enabled. In all test runs, we rebooted the system, ensured all temp and prefetch data was purged, waited several minutes for drive activity to settle and for the system to reach an idle state before invoking a test.

HotHardware Test System Intel Core i7 and SSD Powered

IOMeter I/O Subsystem Measurement Tool

As we've noted in previous SSD articles, though IOMeter is clearly a well-respected industry standard drive benchmark, we're not completely comfortable with it for testing SSDs. The fact of the matter is, though our results with IOMeter appear to scale properly, it is debatable whether or not certain access patterns, as they are presented to and measured on an SSD, actually provide a valid example of real-world performance and the access patterns we tested may not reflect your particular workload. That said, we do think IOMeter is a reliable gauge for relative available throughput within a given storage solution. In addition there are certain higher-end workloads you can place on a drive with IOMeter, that you can't with most other storage benchmark tools available currently.

In the following tables, we're showing two sets of access patterns; our custom Workstation pattern, with an 8K transfer size, 80% reads (20% writes) and 80% random (20% sequential) access and a 4K access pattern with a 4K transfer size, comprised of 67% reads (33% writes) and 100% random access.

The bandwidth numbers reflect was we saw with the IOPs testing -- the Toshiba XG5 offers up decent bandwidth, but ultimately trails the Samsung and Intel drives here.

AS SSD Compression Benchmark Bring Your Translator: http://bit.ly/aRx11n

Next up we ran the Compression Benchmark built-into AS SSD, an SSD specific benchmark being developed by Alex Intelligent Software. This test is interesting because it uses a mix of compressible and non-compressible data and outputs both Read and Write throughput of the drive. We only graphed a small fraction of the data (1% compressible, 50% compressible, and 100% compressible), but the trend is representative of the benchmark’s complete results.

The Toshiba XG5's performance is unaffected by the compressibility of the data being transferred across the drive. Performance remains flat and even throughout in this test.