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.

SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES

THE HG6 256GB (THNSNJ256GCSU)

Typically we received the sample in bulk packaging so nothing else came along with the drive.

The HG6 256GB features a 7mm thick 2.5" aluminum enclosure.

As usual the large sticker placed at the top of the drive includes information such as the model name, serial number, barcode, capacity, factory rollout date, electrical requirements, sector count and connectivity.

The sticker is usually placed at the rear of the drive (also covers these two holes). The HG6 SSD model in our hands makes use of the usual SATA data (v3.1 to be exact) and power connectors.

Tiny screws hold the housing of the drive into place but they are not hard to remove.

The rear side of the PCB is completely empty not only in our 256GB variant but also in the 512GB one (no place for NAND flash modules here).

As you can see all of the modules and the controller have thermal pads on them used to transfer heat to the aluminum casing (not something new but still effective).

There are eight 32GB Toshiba 19nm toggle 2.0 MLC NAND flash modules on this side of the PCB.

Toshiba uses their very own NAND flash controller (TC358790XBG) which we've also seen used in their Q Series Pro series.

TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

   After roughly 6 years of testing sold state drives i have concluded that it's almost impossible for any single benchmark suite to accurately measure their performance and that's why in certain benchmark suites we see amazing read/write performance numbers with some drives while in others things are quite different. The reason behind this is that some benchmarking suites are configured to read and write random chunks of data while others read and write constant (sequential) ones. So that's why i always use a very wide selection of benchmarking suites including AIDA64, HD Tach RW, HD Tune Pro, Crystal Disk Mark, Sisoftware Sandra Pro, AS SSD, IOmeter and ATTO. To get the most accurate results each test gets repeated a total of 6 times with the average performance numbers recorded into our charts.

   Many people made inquiries about the charts ever since the last comparison so once again please do keep in mind that the Charts have the average performance numbers of each drive recorded and not the peak (highest) ones. Also although every single one of these programs can help potential buyers choose the right drive for their needs you should also remember that from any kind of benchmark up to real world usage the gap is not small (and usually most differences will go unnoticed by most people). All tests were performed in a fresh Windows 7 Ultimate x64 installation with every update installed up to August 11th 2014.

TEST RESULTS - AIDA64 / ATTO

TEST RESULTS - HD TUNE PRO / HD TACH RW

TEST RESULTS - SISOFTWARE SANDRA PRO / CRYSTAL DISK MARK

TEST RESULTS - AS SSD / IOMETER

CONCLUSION

   It's clear from all our charts that the HG6 256GB (THNSNJ256GCSU) variant performs identically to the Q Series Pro 256GB model which we reviewed a while back and although using the same NAND flash controller tends to do that i can't really say that i expected such results. The reason is that both the Q Series Pro and the HG6 SSD lines were released just a few months apart and although we've seen many manufacturers do that with SSDs this is the first time I’ve seen such identical performance levels. Is that bad? Certainly not since that automatically means that the HG6 is a very fast and high quality SSD with 4k Random Writes in IOmeter as its only drawback (just like with the Q Series Pro). We did ask Toshiba about the differences between the HG6 and the Q Series Pro just prior to publishing this review but until we get an official answer a wild guess would be that the Q Series Pro SSD line was released for the consumer market (retail) while the HG6 SSD line is mostly aimed at enterprise environments and system integrators (bulk).

   At the time i type these lines the HG6 256GB (THNSNJ256GCSU) SSD model by Toshiba seems to be available only inside the EU for a price of 148Euros (Amazon.co.uk) which is pretty much the same price Toshiba asks for the Q Series Pro 256GB variant so even in that both models are identical. In the end however it really doesn't really matter to us whether or not Toshiba has released 2 or 10 models with identical performance. What does matter is the performance, quality and price of the particular device at hand and the HG6 256GB (THNSNJ256GCSU) SSD model is very fast, comes with a level of quality only manufacturers like Toshiba can offer and it's priced ok which means that it covers all bases for us to give it our Golden Award.

PROS

- Build Quality (Toshiba 19nm Toggle-Mode NAND Flash/Toshiba Controller)
- Very Good Performance
- 3 Years Warranty
- Price (For Some)

CONS

- IOmeter Performance