Toshiba Announces Q300 And Q300 Pro Consumer SSDs

After all the enterprise and OEM drive announcements last month surrounding Flash Memory Summit, we’ve finally got a new drive to talk about that will be sold directly to consumers and available through retailers. Toshiba’s Q300 and Q300 Pro drives are client-focused SATA drives using Toshiba-branded flash and controllers. The Q300 uses TLC flash and has an endurance rating of about 0.23 drive writes per day for three years. The Q300 Pro uses MLC flash and is rated for about 0.34 drive writes per day for five years.

TLC-based drives require more power for writes, but the idle power rating is quite high and makes the Q300 unsuitable for mobile use.

The Q300 Pro seems tuned for a read-oriented workload, with significantly lower random write performance than the Q300, despite TLC being inherently slower for writes. On the other hand, power consumption is much more reasonable, although the Q300 Pro idle power is still a little behind the competition.

The Q300 Pro is listed as using the same TC58 controller that is in the TLC-based OCZ Trion 100, which bore suspicious similarity to the Phison S10 as seen in the Corsair Neutron XT.

The Q300 is shipping now, and the Q300 Pro will ship later this month, when ordered directly from Toshiba’s website. Our review samples are on the same timetable, so look for our benchmarks in a few weeks.

Seagate Announces a Trio of 8TB Drives for Enterprise Applications

Seagate was the first hard drive vendor to launch a cost-effective 8TB hard drive. The Archive HDD v2 (ST8000AS0002) uses Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) to drive up the areal density of the platters and the 8TB version used six 1.33TB platters. The only other 8TB drive currently in the market is the HGST Ultrastar He8, which uses helium filled sealed drives with seven platters.

Seagate is announcing their plans for three new 8TB drives today, mainly targeting enterprise usage. The three 8TB models that join the already existing Archive HDD are:

• Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v5
• Enterprise NAS HDD
• Kinetic HDD

The Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v5 uses traditional PMR (perpendicular magnetic recording) and targets applications such as web, e-mail and SMB servers as well as areas requiring bulk storage. The design uses 6 platters (1.33TB/platter) pointing to an increase in areal density over competing drives. Thanks to the 256MB cache, it provides 100%+ faster random read-writes over the last generation Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v4.
It comes in both SATA 6 Gbps and SAS 12 Gbps versions, and supports Seagate’s RAID Rebuild (PDF) feature.
Consistent with the enterprise positioning, we also have a SED (self-encrypting drive) variant.

The other interesting aspects of the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD v5 include power loss protection (needed in part due to the larger cache) and a PowerBalance feature. The latter offers optional trade-off in performance for saving power. However, the firmware programming necessary to activate this feature will be made available only to OEMs and not small scale end customers.

The Enterprise NAS HDD family is also getting the capacity boost to 8TB. The target market is medium to large business customers with requirements for 24×7 enterprise-class storage for mid-range NAS, RAID and cloud applications. This is the same target segment as before (1-16 bay tower / rackmount enclosures). The power consumption of the Enterprise NAS HDD is lower than the corresponding nearline drives. The Enterprise NAS HDD comes with a 5-year optional ‘Rescue Data Recovery’ service that was discussed in our coverage of the Enterprise NAS HDD launch last year. Like the Enterprise Capacity HDD v5, the Enterprise NAS HDD 8TB version is also based on PMR / 1.33TB/platter technology.

The MTBF, workload ratings and other important characteristics of the various drives offered by Seagate are summarized in the table below.

I had already talked about Kinetic HDDs in our coverage of Seagate at CES 2015. As a recap, the Kinetic HDDs do away with the need for a separate NAS server by presenting two Ethernet links over what looks like a SATA connector. Seagate is sharing some updates today regarding the Kinetic lineup. It is important to note that Kinetic is not a Seagate-only initiative, as Toshiba has also pledged support as a drive vendor for this ecosystem.

As part of the updates, Seagate shared the planned release of the Kinetic OneStor, a 5U 84-bay storage pod, in November this year. In January 2016, the Kinetic HDD 8TB will launch. Unlike the other two 8TB drives being announced today, the Kinetic HDD 8TB will be based on SMR technology.

The two PMR 8TB drives will be available towards the end of October. Seagate did not disclose any pricing information.

Corsair Flash Voyager GS USB 3.0 512GB Flash Drive Capsule Review

The ubiquity of USB 3.0 as a high speed interface for PCs and the increasing affordability of flash memory has led to some very interesting products. USB flash drives are a dime a dozen, but there is scope for manufacturers to differentiate themselves. High-performance flash drives have traditionally employed a SATA SSD controller behind a USB 3.0 – SATA bridge. However, this increases the drive cost in what is essentially a price-sensitive market. Controller vendors have recently started to introduce native high-performance USB 3.0 flash controllers. Today, we look at two products from the Corsair stable – the Flash Voyager GTX and the Flash Voyager GS. While the GTX is the high performance play (topping out at 256GB), the GS is more of a capacity play (the top end version has 512GB of flash memory).

Corsair is one of the very few vendors to have a 512GB thumb drive in their product portfolio. In fact, the only other vendor with a 512GB flash drive is Kingston (I am not considering SSDs in an external enclosure like the Samsung Portable T1). This makes the Flash Voyager GS one of the unique products in the market right now. Users looking at the currently available Flash Voyager GTX will find that the same casing is used for the Flash Voyager GS also. The Flash Voyager GTX 256GB was one of the earliest flash drives that we evaluated with the new methodology. Since then, Corsair has changed the casing while retaining the same internals and model name / number. In addition to evaluating the performance of the Voyager GS, we will also be looking at the new Voyager GTX (referred to as Voyager GTX v2 hereon).

Hardware Design and Internals

The housings of both the Corsair Flash Voyager GS and GTX are made of a zinc alloy with aluminium accents. There is a small loop at one end for attaching to a keyring. An activity LED is also near the loop. While the previous generation Corsair Voyager GTX’s external design was not as stylish, it at least allowed the protective cap to be securely placed at the other end during active usage. This is not possible in the current housing design. The photographs below show the Corsair Voyager GS and GTX v2 as well as the the old and new Voyager GTX versions side by side.

We already know from our previous review that the Voyager GTX comes with the Phison S9 SSD controller behind a USB 3.0 – SATA bridge. The Voyager GS is a native USB 3.0 flash drive, and the internals (Phison PS2251-01 with Toshiba MLC flash) could be determined without looking at the unit.

Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology

Evaluation of DAS units on Windows is done with the testbed outlined in the table below. For devices with USB 3.0 connections (such as the Corsair Voyager GS and GTX that we are considering today), we utilize the USB 3.0 port directly hanging off the PCH.

The full details of the reasoning behind choosing the above build components can be found here. The list of DAS units used for comparison purposes is provided below.

• Corsair Voyager GS 512GB
• Corsair Voyager GTX v2 256GB
• Corsair Voyager GTX 256GB
• LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GB
• Patriot Supersonic Rage 2 256GB
• VisionTek Pocket SSD 240GB

Synthetic Benchmarks – ATTO and Crystal DiskMark

Corsair claims read and write speeds of around 290 MBps for the Voyager GS. ATTO reports only around 160 MBps for writes and 270 MBps for reads with our standard test settings. For the GTX v2, the results are in the same ballpark as that of the original GTX (around 375 MBps writes and 460 MBps reads).

Corsair Voyager GS 512GBCorsair Voyager GTX v2 256GBCorsair Voyager GTX 256GBLaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GBPatriot Supersonic Rage 2 256GBVisionTek Pocket SSD 240GB

CrystalDiskMark, despite being a canned benchmark, provides a better estimate of the performance range with a selected set of numbers. These numbers seem to back up Corsair’s performance claims. As evident from the screenshot below, the performance can dip to as low as 0.8 MBps for 4K random accesses at low queue depths for the Voyager GS. For the GTX v2 / GTX, these tests show around 400 MBps reads and 180 MBps writes – the two versions don’t differ much in the artificial benchmarks, as expected.

Corsair Voyager GS 512GBCorsair Voyager GTX v2 256GBCorsair Voyager GTX 256GBLaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GBPatriot Supersonic Rage 2 256GBVisionTek Pocket SSD 240GB

Benchmarks – robocopy and PCMark 8 Storage Bench

Our testing methodology for DAS units also takes into consideration the usual use-case for such devices. The most common usage scenario is transfer of large amounts of photos and videos to and from the unit. The minor usage scenario is importing files directly off the DAS into a multimedia editing program such as Adobe Photoshop.

In order to tackle the first use-case, we created three test folders with the following characteristics:

• Photos: 15.6 GB collection of 4320 photos (RAW as well as JPEGs) in 61 sub-folders
• Videos: 16.1 GB collection of 244 videos (MP4 as well as MOVs) in 6 sub-folders
• BR: 10.7 GB Blu-ray folder structure of the IDT Benchmark Blu-ray (the same that we use in our robocopy tests for NAS systems)

For the second use-case, we take advantage of PC Mark 8’s storage bench. The storage workload involves games as well as multimedia editing applications. The command line version allows us to cherry-pick storage traces to run on a target drive. We chose the following traces.

• Adobe Photoshop (Light)
• Adobe Photoshop (Heavy)
• Adobe After Effects
• Adobe Illustrator

Usually, PC Mark 8 reports time to complete the trace, but the detailed log report has the read and write bandwidth figures which we present in our performance graphs. Note that the bandwidth number reported in the results don’t involve idle time compression. Results might appear low, but that is part of the workload characteristic. Note that the same testbed is being used for all DAS units. Therefore, comparing the numbers for each trace should be possible across different DAS units.

Performance Consistency

Yet another interesting aspect of these types of units is performance consistency. Aspects that may influence this include thermal throttling and firmware caps on access rates to avoid overheating or other similar scenarios. This aspect is an important one, as the last thing that users want to see when copying over, say, 100 GB of data to the flash drive, is the transfer rate going to USB 2.0 speeds. In order to identify whether the drive under test suffers from this problem, we instrumented our robocopy DAS benchmark suite to record the flash drive’s read and write transfer rates while the robocopy process took place in the background. For supported drives, we also recorded the internal temperature of the drive during the process. The graphs below show the speeds observed during our real-world DAS suite processing. The first three sets of writes and reads correspond to the photos suite. A small gap (for the transfer of the videos suite from the primary drive to the RAM drive) is followed by three sets for the next data set. Another small RAM-drive transfer gap is followed by three sets for the Blu-ray folder.

An important point to note here is that each of the first three blue and green areas correspond to 15.6 GB of writes and reads respectively. Throttling, if any, is apparent within the processing of the photos suite itself. The Corsair Voyager GS and the new GTX don’t suffer from any such issues.

Corsair Voyager GS 512GBCorsair Voyager GTX v2 256GBCorsair Voyager GTX 256GBLaCie Rugged Thunderbolt 500GBPatriot Supersonic Rage 2 256GBVisionTek Pocket SSD 240GB

The surprising results in the above graphs involve the GTX v2 and GTX. While the original GTX took around 1900s to finish the benchmark, the GTX v2 took around 2200s. The reason behind this is evident in the robocopy benchmarks also – the write speeds of the new GTX seem to be a tad lower compared to the original GTX even though CrystalDiskMark and ATTO seem to indicate that both should have comparable performance. Corsair assured us that nothing had changed internally, but we did see that our original results were with firmware version S9FM01.7, while the GTX v2 came with S9FM02B1. Corsair indicated that S9FM02B1 is the best firmware to use for both the GTX and GTXv2.

Concluding Remarks

Coming to the business end of the review, the Corsair Voyager GS continues Corsair’s leadership in the USB flash drive area. With a 512GB capacity, the Voyager GS is one of only two high capacity thumb drives available in the market. We have already talked about the GTX, and, as mentioned before, the availability of a real SSD controller in the form of the Phison S9 makes it one of the drives we would recommend for portable OS installations.

The Corsair Voyager GS doesn’t support TRIM or any SMART commands. The Voyager GTX, on the other hand, supports both. Corsair’s SSD Toolbox removed support for the Voyager GTX sometime last year. However, with 1.2.3.5 (released last week), support for the thumb drive is back. The SSD toolbox allows setting of software overprovisioning on the drive, something important to ensure performance consistency when used as a portable OS drive.

In terms of pricing, the Voyager GS 512GB retails for $315, while the GTX v2 256GB comes in at $185. These come in the middle of the pack in the price per GB graph above. As discussed earlier in this section, the GS and GTX v2 have different claims to uniqueness as justification for the slight pricing premium.