With the Q300 Pro series Toshiba has SSDs in their portfolio which offer convincing performance, maxing out the SATA interface. Apart from that there is MLC NAND flash memory and therefore endurance is on a very competitive level as well. Overall the Q300 Pro could be an interesting drive and now we really want to know what this SSD is capable of.


Specifications / Delivery

Model	Q300 Pro 128 Gigabyte	Q300 Pro 256 Gigabyte	Q300 Pro 512 Gigabyte
Capacity	128 GB	256 GB	512 GB
Form Factor	2.5'', 7 mm	2.5'', 7 mm	2.5'', 7 mm
Memory	MLC Toggle NAND 19nm	MLC Toggle NAND 19nm	MLC Toggle NAND 19nm
Endurance	~ 80 TBW	~ 160 TBW	~ 350 TBW
Controller	Toshiba Alishan	Toshiba Alishan	Toshiba Alishan
Model	Toshiba 19nm - A19 TLC	Toshiba 19nm - A19 TLC	Toshiba 19nm - A19 TLC
Throughput	550 MB/s sequential read 510 MB/s sequential write 91'000 IOPS 4K random read 59'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 520 MB/s sequential write 92'000 IOPS 4K random read 63'000 IOPS 4K random write	550 MB/s sequential read 530 MB/s sequential write 90'000 IOPS 4K random read 54'000 IOPS 4K random write
Accesstime (read)	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms	< 0.1 ms
Acoustics	no noise	no noise	no noise
Warranty	5 Years	5 Years	5 Years
Price

The Q300 Pro is a Toshiba SSD which has been built according to a proven concept. The drive is based on 19nm MLC NAND Flash and a TC358790 controller while – to our surprise – there is no DRAM chip. The case has been made from thin sheet aluminum and the entire drive measures 7 millimeter in height. Toshiba equips every single chip on the SSD with thermal pads, which allows for effective heat dissipation, especially in combination with the aluminum casing. Apart from that the PCB with all the chips has been tightly screwed to the casing, ensuring good heat conductivity.

 A look at the portfolio of Toshiba Q300 Pro drives shows that there is a 128 Gigabyte, a 256 Gigabyte as well as a 512 Gigabyte drive. These days it would be nice if there also was a 1 Terabyte model, since an increasing number of users is going to buy high-capacity drives. So far, if you think about building a high-performance system and you want to use Toshiba Q300 Pro drives, your option would be to buy two 512 Gigabyte drives and create a RAID0 configuration. That way you can realize a 1 Terabyte boot drive, which on top offers twice the performance at the cost of 50 percent of the reliability.

Checking the box for additional goodies, we find a spacer in the delivery, which makes the Q300 Pro compatible with 2.5 inch/9.5 millimeter expansions slots. Apart from that there is a free copy of NTI’s Echo software included, which offers a simple way to upgrade from your old drive to your new Q300 Pro. Last but not least, Toshiba backs this drive up with a five year warranty plan, which is basically state-of-the-art in the case of higher-price MLC based SSDs of today.

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