Toshiba TR200 SSD tested – A lot of storage for relatively little money
The end of the OCZ name was set in motion long ago, with the takeover of OCZ by the Japanese Toshiba, but the OCZ brand name has now really disappeared. After the acquisition, solid state drives were still released with the OCZ name still on the product and the Toshiba brand underneath. OCZ Technology Group became OCZ Storage Solutions, but that name can no longer be found in the new products either. Toshiba has now reversed the naming and the name of the parent company is now leading and the brand name OCZ has become a sub-name.
We received the Toshiba OCZ TR200 from the Japanese manufacturer, in a capacity of 960GB. The drive is the successor to both OCZ’s TL100 and TR150, but should also succeed Toshiba’s own A100 and Q300 series. Toshiba therefore chooses not to have several, but only one series of 2.5″ SATA SSDs in its range. The reason behind this is quite simple. SATA SSDs are starting to reach a point where, just like hard drives, become such an everyday product that price and capacity are considered more than performance.
It therefore makes little sense for Toshiba to offer a SATA SSD series that is intended for the enthusiast segment, since such SSDs then come into the waters of NVME drives in terms of price. And as is known, a SATA SSD can never come close to the performance of an NVME SSD due to the limited bandwidth of the SATA interface. So the reasoning is that users who want to pay more for better performance choose an NVMe drive, and people who want a lot of storage space without the excruciating slowness of hard drives choose a SATA SSD.
We have therefore tested the 960GB version of the TR200. Toshiba achieves that capacity by using TLC memory, so that three bits are stored per memory cell. To further reduce costs, Toshiba’s BicS nand has been used, which can now produce chips with 64 layers of memory. Last summer we published a background on bics and tlc memory, among other things , where you can read more about this technique.
Toshiba doesn’t give any details about the controller other than that it’s a dram-less design. This reduces costs, but also performance, because the controller cannot cache data. We took the drive apart and examined the hard-to-read controller lettering. It turns out to be a TC58NC1010GSB-00 controller, which is very similar to the controller used in the Toshiba A100 series. However, the series does not exactly match, because the A100 contains an SSPRL1CC W5 controller, while our TR200 sample contains an STQTQ1CC W5.
The performance
We compared the drive with some other well-known budget series from Crucial and Samsung, where unfortunately we were not able to test the same capabilities. The BX100 and BX200 series are no longer available, as is the 750GB version of the MX300. Samsung supplies the 750 EVO series in capacities up to 500GB.
The bandwidth of the PCMark Storage run is low, but quite average compared to its competitors. If we include a fast NVMe drive in the comparison, the 960 EVO, then we see why you would choose a high-end SSD for your system disk. In our traces the TR200 doesn’t show up too well, partly because it is a cacheless drive and partly because, especially with writing, tlc-nand is a bit slower.
In the AS-SSD tests, purely synthetic benchmarks, the TR200 comes off fine. The bandwidth of the sata interface is limited, but there is still some space, especially when writing. The random read and write performance with 64 threads is much better than the competition.
The TR200 series drive is therefore intended for the budget segment, or rather the segment where capacity and price are more important than performance. The prices are also accordingly, because at a time when nand is becoming increasingly expensive, the TR200 series costs 83 euros for the 240GB version, 149 euros for the 480GB version and 276 euros for the largest 960GB drive.
Conclusion
Helped by the legacy of OCZ, Toshiba succeeds in putting a budget drive on the market that delivers excellent performance. It is a good choice for a home garden and kitchen system, but for a high-end monster you naturally choose the much faster NVMe drives. However, if you want a large SSD to replace your hard drive without paying the top price, the TR200 has you covered.
Nevertheless, there are various alternatives that also offer high capacity for a low price. For example, you can get the MX300 for a comparable price per gigabyte, but apart from that series and Microns 1100 series, you quickly end up with old drives such as the Sandisk Ultra II from 2014. For a modern drive, the TR200 is fine and with a three-year warranty, you don’t have to worry about the longevity of tlc either.