Toshiba RC500 500GB M.2 NVMe SSD Review

Today it is time to take a look at the newest SSD from Toshiba. Yes, they'll soon be called KIOXIA, but that's another story. I'm taking a closer look at the RC500 today with a capacity of 500GB. Toshiba RC500 NVMe SSD The RC500 is the first retail SSD featuring the 96-layer BiCS4 FLASH TLC 3D memory. While that probably doesn't mean a lot to consumers as such, it's a good thing as it allows the company to bring you more capacity at a lower price. The RC500 is a default PCIe Gen3 drive utilising four PCIe lanes. It also defaults when it comes to the form factor. It comes in an M.2 2280 form factor which is the most common. The bare module design further allows for maximum compatibility for both portable and stationary systems. Compared to the RC100, the RC500 is a big step up. While the RC100 was tiny, the RC500 brings things back to what we know and love. The drive has once again split the controller and NAND into separate packages on the module and you'll also find a DRAM chip again to speed up things. The module is also gone full PCIe with the M-type connector. SSD Performance and Endurance Toshiba didn't build the RC500 to break any records, instead, it's meant to be affordable for the average user and PC builder. While that's true, it doesn't mean that the drive will perform badly in any way. It is rated for a sequential performance of up to 1700MB/s when reading and 1600MB/s when writing. The random performance is rated for up to 290K when reading and 390K when writing. That's not bad at all. Endurance isn't too bad either, although not as high as some other drives. The TBW rating is set at 200TB for this capacity while the MTBF has a common 1.5 million hours rating. Toshiba backs the whole thing with a 5-year warranty. What Does Toshiba Have To Say? "Upgrading from a hard drive or SATA SSD should be easy and affordable and that’s where RC500 SSDs come in. TOSHIBA RC500 NVMe™ SSD Series is built to boost your mobile or PC experience and deliver well-balanced performance, reliability, and value that will transform your system. Leveraging 96-layer 3D flash memory (BiCS FLASH™), this new mainstream-class SSD series offers up to 1TB of capacity and a 5-year warranty in a M.2 2280 form factor suitable for both desktops and notebooks." You can read more about the drive and its details on the official product page. Feature Highlights Standard M.2 2280 form factorAffordable for everyoneAvailable as 500GB and 250GB versionsBuilt with 96-layer BiCS Flash RC500 Package and Accessories We get the RC500 from Toshiba in familiar packaging. At least it is familiar if you've had OCZ drives in the past. The colourful box features a picture of the drive on the front along with the model name, capacity, and form factor. The rear side has a few more details as well as links to the product pages in various languages. The drive itself is well packed inside the box, sitting in the middle of a large plastic box. Even if the outer box should get some bumps along the way, the drive is well protected in the middle. There's also a small note which shows the easiest way to remove the drive from the package. Testing & Methodology In a bid to make our testing as thorough and as accurate as possible, we have devised a testing methodology that will give us the maximum amount of data. While this means that testing each drive will take considerably longer – easily up 36 hours – the overall picture that we can gather is bigger too. It helps both you as the reader and us as the reviewer’s to gain a clearer view of the drive’s overall performance, strengths, and weaknesses. It also provides a more accurate analysis of how each drive performs under different conditions. Data Fillage There are many ways to test a storage drive, and we have chosen to include close to every test possible. We will start with a typical benchmark analysis of the formatted drive with various village scenarios. However, depending on how a drive is built, the performance may differ depending on how much data it is already storing. Testing this, the drive will be tested empty as well as with 25%, 50%, and 75% space usage. For these tests, we will be using Anvil’s Storage Utilities, AS SSD Benchmark, ATTO Benchmark, and CrystalDiskMark. Application and Gaming Besides these synthetic fill tests, the drive is tested with PCMark 8’s storage benchmark to get real-world performance results. Plain Drive Performance Following the fillage tests, the partition gets removed, and we check the drive’s raw performance. These tests will determine the hardware’s capabilities while eliminating any interference from the set file system. AIDA64’s storage benchmark and IOmeter are both great tools for this, and they help us paint an even clearer picture of the drive. The IOmeter tests I run are quite different from the rest as they will give a final result after a longer performance test rather than a maximum or average score; this gives us yet another view of the tested drive over the regular tests. Drive Conditioning Durability is a vital factor when it comes to NAND-based drives as the chips only can be rewritten so many times before they’ll stop working properly. Modern SSDs come with wear-level algorithms to increase the lifetime and reduce this factor as much as possible. We also take this into consideration in our reviews even tho it would take years to simulate this under real-world conditions. Luckily, Anvil’s Storage Utilities comes with an endurance test that can perform this action much faster, but it is still a time-consuming process. Depending on the hardware, this can easily take several days, and we write thousands and thousands of small files in various sizes and compressibility to drive over and over. Following this conditioning process, all of the previous benchmarks will be run again in the same scenarios and the same order. This will give us a great view of how a drive will perform after prolonged usage, and that is a very vital factor when you pick out your storage drive. The Preparation and In Between The drive will be formatted as NTFS with default settings, as most users will do. The quick format option isn’t used as that might affect the performance the first time data is written. Modern operating systems all take care of the TRIM command in the background and it isn’t something to worry about for regular users. However, for these reviews, I will add a waiting period between each benchmark to make sure that the TRIM command has been fully executed and finished. After all, we want a clear picture of the drive’s performance with minimal interference from the operating system. On each page that follows with the benchmark results, I have inserted result screenshots from the benchmarks, created drive analysis chart for the fill-level performance, and added drive comparison charts where possible. Hardware Supermicro C7Z270-PG Intel Core i7-7700KCrucial Ballistix Sport DDR4 2400MHz (4x8GB)Toshiba VX500 512GB SSDbe quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 (1200W)Noctua NH-D15SCooler Master HAF XB EVO with Noctua NF-A14 FLX fans Software AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage UtilitiesAS SSD BenchmarkATTO BenchmarkCrystalDiskMarkIOMeterPCMark 8 Storage BenchmarkWindows 10 AIDA64 Storage Benchmark AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users with a broad range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. The app has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one I’ll be using. Fresh Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access Time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Conditioned Drive The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives us a view of the drives overall performance from start to end. The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Drive Analysis Anvil's Storage Benchmark Anvil’s Storage Utilities is a complete benchmark solution used to test any writeable storage drive. It also has a drive endurance test that consistently reads and writes data to the selected medium to deliver days, months, and potentially even years of use in a shorter period. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. AS SSD Storage Benchmark The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD, and they aren’t using the operating system cache. The copy tests are cached and as such not viable results at this time. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. ATTO Disk Benchmark The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customise your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD and SSD benchmark utility that allows you to measure a drive’s sequential and random performance. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Analysis With the performance analysis, we get a good view of the drive’s consistency. We want as straight a line as possible for a good result. Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. IOmeter IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterisation tool for single and clustered systems. As a benchmark and troubleshooting tool, it is configurable to replicate the behaviour of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. Sequential Tests Random Tests Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark PCMark 8 Storage benchmark tests the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and SSHD hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of games. You can test any recognised storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. Fresh Drive Conditioned Drive Drive Comparison For the drive comparison, we will use the performance figures from empty drives here. Pricing and Final Thoughts At the time of this review, the new Toshiba RC500 hasn't hit the retail channels yet. However, we do have the official MSRP which are £34.99 for the 250GB model and £49.99 for the 500GB model. Final Thoughts I was quite surprised by the Toshiba RC500, and in a positive way at that. While this is a budget drive and not meant to break any performance barriers, it did incredibly well in my tests. Especially at random operations, the drive shines with impressive numbers. The times where budget meant slow or bad are long gone as Toshiba proves with the RC500. In general, Toshiba once again proves that they know what a lot of people want. Not only in regard to a great cost per capacity ration. Also when it comes to capacity itself. While we all would love 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and higher drives, it is the fewest of us that will get them. Instead, Toshiba bets on the 250GB and 500GB capacity which is where there are most drives sold. It is affordable and big enough to hold the OS and several games and apps without worry. To quote something from my youth, headshot Doug: Boom, headshot! Boom headshot! Should I Purchase One? Do you want a great performing drive for a small amount of money? Is 500GB enough capacity for you in a single drive? Then the Toshiba RC500 will be an amazing purchase. Pros Good performance/price ratio5-year warrantyStandard M.2 2280 single-sided form factor for maximum compatibility Cons The largest model is the 500GB version "Toshiba hits the mark with the RC500 SSD. Good performance for a small price is what everyone wants." Thank you, Toshiba, for providing us with this sample.