With their Q300 Toshiba appears to be blowing for attack in the price war. All Q300 drives feature a highly competitive price tag. At this point it's obviously the performance question that remains to be answered and we're curious to find how this drive does in our review.


Specifications / Delivery

Model	Toshiba Q300 120GB	Toshiba Q300 240GB	Toshiba Q300 480GB	Toshiba Q300 960GB
Capacity	120 GB	240 GB	480 GB	960 GB
Form Factor	2.5''	2.5''	2.5''	2.5''
Controller	Toshiba Alishan - TC58NC1000	Toshiba Alishan - TC58NC1000	Toshiba Alishan - TC58NC1000	Toshiba Alishan - TC58NC1000
Memory	TLC Toggle NAND (A19) 19nm ~1'200 P/E-cycles	TLC Toggle NAND (A19) 19nm ~1'200 P/E-cycles	TLC Toggle NAND (A19) 19nm ~1'200 P/E-cycles	TLC Toggle NAND (A19) 19nm ~1'200 P/E-cycles
Throughput	550 MB/s sequential read 450 MB/s sequential write 81'000 IOPS 4K random read 40'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 520 MB/s sequential write 86'000 IOPS 4K random read 73'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 520 MB/s sequential write 86'000 IOPS 4K random read 83'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 530 MB/s sequential write 87'000 IOPS 4K random read 83'000 IOPS 4K random write
Endurance	30 TBW	60 TBW	120 TBW	240 TBW
Power Consumption	5 Watt active 1 Watt idle	5 Watt active 1 Watt idle	5 Watt active 1 Watt idle	5 Watt active 1 Watt idle
Warranty	3 Years	3 Years	3 Years	3 Years
Price

With the Q300 Toshiba shows their first SSD, which is based on TLC NAND flash memory. Thanks to this choice Toshiba is now able to compete with entry level offerings from Samsung and Crucial. As you might know, TLC memory chips are capable of storing three bits per cell, whereas MLC can only hold two bits. This allows for increased capacity per NAND chip and provides the vendor with more headroom when it comes to pricing, since the production cost is lower.

When it comes to the controller we find Toshibas TC58, or to be even more precise: TC58NC1000GSB-00. Apart from that it has been combined with TH58TET1UDKBAEG NAND flash memory, which, as we already mentioned, is TLC NAND. A closer look at the line-up reveals there are four different models being launched available, where there is a 120GB, a 240GB, a 480GB and a 960GB derivate. A closer look at the bundle you get with the Q300 entry level drives, shows even clearer that Toshiba wants to keep the price low. There is basically only the manual, the warranty terms and a spacer to make drive fit neatly in 9mm 2.5'' expansion slots. Apart from that you get three years warranty.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 7 - Random read KByte/s
Page 2 - Impressions	Page 8 - Random write IOPS
Page 3 - How do we test?	Page 9 - Random read IOPS
Page 4 - Sequential write KByte/s	Page 10 - QD1/4/8/16/32 Performance
Page 5 - Sequential read KByte/s	Page 11 - Conclusion
Page 6 - Random write KByte/s