The Toshiba XG5 (1TB) SSD Review

AnandTech Storage Bench - The Destroyer

The Destroyer is an extremely long test replicating the access patterns of very IO-intensive desktop usage. A detailed breakdown can be found in this article. Like real-world usage, the drives do get the occasional break that allows for some background garbage collection and flushing caches, but those idle times are limited to 25ms so that it doesn't take all week to run the test. These AnandTech Storage Bench (ATSB) tests do not involve running the actual applications that generated the workloads, so the scores are relatively insensitive to changes in CPU performance and RAM from our new testbed, but the jump to a newer version of Windows and the newer storage drivers can have an impact.

We quantify performance on this test by reporting the drive's average data throughput, the average and 99th percentile latency of the I/O operations, and the total energy used by the drive over the course of the test.

The Toshiba XG5's average data rate on The Destroyer isn't fast enough to compete with Samsung's drives, but it beats some of the slower MLC-based PCIe SSDs and is much faster than the other (non-Samsung) TLC SSDs.

The average latency of the XG5 on The Destroyer is slower than the top NVMe SSDs including the Samsung 960 EVO, but the XG5's performance is still decent. The TLC-based WD Black and Intel 600p have average latencies that are several times higher. The 99th percentile latency of the Toshiba XG5 is very good, with a third-place score that beats all of Samsung's SSDs.

The drive rankings for average read and write latencies are very similar, with the Toshiba XG5 scoring in the middle of the pack on both measures. The overall spread of scores is very different: while the XG5's average read latency is only 25% slower than the fastest SSD and is essentially tied with the Samsung 960 EVO, its average write latency is almost 3.5 times worse than the fastest drive.

The 99th percentile latency scores of the XG5 are great for a TLC SSD. The write latency places the XG5 in the top tier of drives, while its read score is better than average among a widely varying bunch. The Intel SSD 750 is the only drive that offers better 99th percentile latency for both read and write operations.

Only a handful of drives have ever completed The Destroyer while using less energy than the Toshiba XG5. Most of those were SM2246EN-based SATA drives, and a few other SATA SSDs. The Crucial MX300 and Intel 545s are the only other TLC SSDs with this kind of efficiency. None of the other NVMe SSDs come close; the fastest competitors sacrifice power efficiency to obtain that performance, and the slower NVMe SSDs waste too much power operating a PCIe link that they can't fully utilize.