Toshiba makes its mark on the performance end of the SSD market.
Sometimes, simplicity is lovely. Who makes this SSD? Toshiba. Whose 19nm MLC NAND flash memory makes up its precious bits? Toshiba’s. Who makes the controller? Samsu… no, it’s Toshiba. Good thing for the company, then, that it’s not a bad piece of kit at all.
Despite Toshiba having bought OCZ seemingly as a good name for consumer-level stuff, the HG6 drives sold under its own name are still a nice option for the higher end of the general market, where the roughly £250 price tag is fairly normal. Yes, it’s almost £100 more than you can get Crucial’s 512GB MX100 SSD for, but it’s a lot less than you pay for the same size Plextor M6e PCIe SSD.
Still, if it’s going to cost above budget, it’s got to justify that in performance – and largely, it does. The ATTO benchmark of a 553MB/s read speed is up there with the fastest SATA SSDs we’ve tested in recent memory, as is the 519MB/s write speed. The highest sequential read speed we hit was 502MB/s, again near the top of the class, though we have to note the 528MB/s scored by the Samsung 850 Pro, and that drive doesn’t cost that much more. The sequential write speed of 474MB/s is also strong, but again the Samsung’s 850 Pro manages to beat it again at 502MB/s.
Things drop off a little when we look at random 4k tests, though. 4k read speeds of 22MB/s and write speeds of 96MB/s aren’t terrible, by any means, but are notably behind the Samsung and the SanDisk Extreme Pro, both of which pass 30MB/s for read and get well past 100MB/s for write. But hey – synthetic tests aren’t everything. In fact the HG6 makes a full comeback when it comes to real-world testing. Compressing a 5GB folder in 71 seconds makes it one of the fastest we’ve seen, while it chewed through our 30GB file transfer in 188 seconds, besting most similar drives we’ve tested recently.
It feels like the HG6 performs well enough to justify its price tag for the most part, then, so the question of whether to choose it over the likes of the SanDisk Extreme Pro or Samsung 850 Pro might well come down to something beyond speed. The drive includes a self-encryption option, for example, though so does the Samsung. Reliability is always a key question, but it’s a mixed bag for the Toshiba drive here. On the plus side, every NAND chip inside has an individual thermal pad, as does the controller, so it should be great for intensive use. However, we can’t help but eye the three-year warranty (compared to 10 with the SanDisk or Samsung) with suspicion, and note the 1.5 million hours between failure rating here compared to 2 million hours in the Samsung.
Toshiba has clearly made the most of being in control of this drive’s components, producing an SSD that’s just about as fast they go without moving from SATA to PCIe and jacking up the price considerably. Yet isn’t quite first choice for us. The Samsung 850 Pro is a little more expensive, but it’s also a little faster, with far better reliability. Matthew Bolton
Vital Statistics
Price £242
Manufacturer Toshiba
Web storage.toshiba.com
Capacity 512GB
Memory type Toshiba A19nm Toggle 2.0 MLC NAND
Memory controller Toshiba TC358790XBG
Cache Adaptive Size SLC Write cache
Reliability Mean time to failure 1,500,000 hours
Warranty Three years