Conclusion

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Toshibas Q300 TLC-SSD comes with an extremely aggressive price tag. Checking the usual price comparison portals we find the following prices per gigabyte: 120GB - 0.40 €/GB, 240GB - 0.29 €/GB, 480GB - 0.25 €/GB, 960GB - 0.29 €/GB. It’s interesting to see that the 480 Gigabyte model offers the lowest price per gigabyte since usually that’s the honor the highest capacity drive. In other words the Q300 is a very cheap SSD but unfortunately some of that is reflected on the performance side.

A closer look at the performance reveals that according to our tests especially the write performance is simply not on a competitive level. Maybe Toshiba is going to release a future firmware update, which is going to correct that by a certain extent. Having a closer look at the numbers we measured 199 MB/s for sequential write and about 34’300 IOPS for random write. A quick look at the sequential read performance shows 544 MB/s and in the case of random read we measured 85’800 IOPS. When it comes to the read performance the world appears to be in perfect order. It’s just a pity that it isn’t regarding write performance.

It looks like Toshiba wants to win market share and in order to do so they’re opening the next round in the price battle. If this drive featured competitive write performance then it would be a great deal, which is precisely why we’re hoping that Toshiba can boost write performance with a firmware update or a future revision of the Q300.

Recommendation

Should you be looking for a very aggressively priced SSD, and should write performance not be of importance to you, then the Q300 can considered.

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