INTRODUCTION

   It seems that all the recent price drops in storage media along with the increased competition have in a way "pushed" SSD manufacturers to dish out more SSD models inside 2014 alone than any other year prior and that's really a very good thing for consumers around the world. Sure it may make things harder for you when you’re finally going to pull the trigger on which SSD model to purchase but in the end that matters little since at least performance-wise most high-end models are trading blows. Of course it goes without saying that when you spend your hard earned money you want the best of both worlds so performance and quality are obviously the two main things you want to look for in an SSD and Toshiba is certainly amongst those manufacturers which should be on your to check list when the time comes. Just a few months back Toshiba released their latest HG6 line of SSDs and today we'll be testing the 256GB variant (THNSNJ256GCSU).

   Toshiba Europe Storage Products Division (SPD) has remained at the forefront of the storage industry for over 40 years and is the world's only storage supplier that owns design, development, manufacturing, sales and other infrastructure functions spanning the enterprise, mobile and retail environments for both HDD and SSD products. Customers are original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), system integrators and distributors within the EMEA region. As a leading provider of integrated storage solutions and as the principal inventor of NAND flash storage, Toshiba sets many of today’s industry standards for storage technology. Throughout its history, Toshiba SPD has revolutionized the design and development of storage devices and its drives can be found inside the world's leading GPS navigation systems, consumer electronics, computers and enterprise solutions. In addition, Toshiba Storage Products Division offers an extensive range of advanced technology drives such as high durability 24/7, extended temperature and SSDs for the consumer, industrial, enterprise and automotive sector.

   For the entire HG6 line of SSDs (60/128/256/512GB models) Toshiba has used their very own NAND flash controller and 19nm toggle 2.0 MLC (multi-level cell) NAND flash modules so the level of quality here is obviously high. The HG6 line of SSDs comes packed with features including their very own adaptive size SLC write cache technology (obviously used to improve write performance), enterprise-grade quadruple swing-by code error correction technology (reliability feature), advanced power management (APM), native command queuing (NCQ), end data path protection and self-encryption making it fully compatible with TCG/OPAL 2.0 (supports on the fly hardware level encryption via compatible applications). Toshiba also gives the entire HG6 SSD line a reliability rating (MTTF) of up to 1.500.000 hours so it doesn't really come as a surprise that they also aim these drives for intensive workload environments such as workstations and servers. Of course we can't really test Toshibas reliability rating but we can find out just how fast the 256GB variant of the HG6 line is so let's do just that.