Toshiba MQ02 Series 500GB SSHD Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Toshiba’s MQ02 drive is relative new and can be tricky to find for purchase, but it’s a common OEM drive to be found in pre-built systems and notebooks. NewEgg has it listed for $59.99 in the US and UK-based readers can find the 500GB model for £59.35 on Amazon where the 1TB also can be had for £70.06. Overclockers UK only has the 1TB in stock, but you can get it for a cheap price of £69.98. German readers can find a good deal through Geizhals where the 500GB model starts at €67.46 and the 1TB starts at €78.12.

Conclusion

Toshiba has a long experience in both flash storage and mechanical storage, so it’s no surprise that the MQ02 displayed itself as a great drive. It is however a very difficult drive to benchmark and that is based on the very method the drive is built upon.

There is a normal 5400RPM hard disk part that performs as one should. Toshiba managed to create a drive that is so silent that you shouldn’t be hearing a single noise from it when it is placed inside your system. The NAND flash was added to aid the mechanical part and work as an intelligent cache.

And the last part is what makes it difficult to benchmark. The drive will learn which files are the hottest and store those in the NAND for quick access and it will continue to do that over its entire lifetime. This will decrease your boot-up times as well as help you with your most used apps and their loading times.

BootRacer is probably the application that best shows what this drive can do and most synthetic benchmarks fail to show real scores. AIDA64 and IOmeter are two of the benchmark apps that show the real numbers and those are the ones you should go by.

As this is an OEM drive, there weren’t any accessories added. The drive in itself is very simple designed with a silver top, black bottom with PCB mounted, and a large sticker on the top with all information about the drive.

Pros

• Faster than mechanical drives
• Silent operation
• Intelligent Caching technology

Cons

• Not as fast as an SSD

“The Toshiba MQ02 series is great for everyone that want the large capacity of HDDs and some of the SSDs speed at a fair price. It will speed up your boot times as well as application loads.”

Thank you Toshiba for providing us with this sample.