The latest addition to Kioxia's family of M.2 NVMe SSDs is the Toshiba RC500. Aimed at the value end of the market, the RC500 is the first consumer drive launched that uses the company's latest 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND. The RC500 comes in just two capacities, 250GB and 500GB and uses the latest 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND in combination with an in-house Toshiba 4-channel controller, details of which, are extremely hard to find. Kioxia quote performance figures of up to 1,700MB/s for Sequential reads for both capacities with Sequential writes rated as up to 1,200MB/s for the 250GB model and up to 1,600MB/s for the 500GB unit. Random read/write figures for the two drives are up to 190,000 IOPS for reads and 290,000 IOPS for writes for the 250GB model while the 500GB drive gets ratings of up to 290,000 IOPS for reads with writes at up to 390,000 IOPS. Power consumption for the 500GB drive is quoted as 3.9W typical active and 50mW and 5mW for PS3 and PS4 power states respectively. The endurance of the drive is quoted as 200TB TBW and Kioxia back the drive with a 5-year warranty. Physical Specifications: Usable Capacities: 500GB. NAND Components: Toshiba 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND. NAND Controller: Toshiba. Cache: 512MB DDR4-2400MHz. Interface: PCIe 3.0 Gen3 x4 / NVMe 1.3c. Form Factor: M.2 2280. Dimensions: 80 x 22 x 2.23mm. Drive Weight: 6.9g. Firmware Version: ECFA125 The Kioxia Toshiba RC500 comes in a compact box with an image of the drive on the front with a sticker on the top right displaying the capacity of the drive. The rear of the box has a small panel on the left-hand side displaying some of the drives features while the remaining area on the right has multilingual instructions on where to find out more information about the drive. Toshiba's 500GB RC500 is built on a single-sided M.2 2280 format. Nearest the interface contacts is a 512MB SK hynix DDR4-2400MHz (coded H5AN4G6NBJR) IC, next to which is the Toshiba 4-channel controller (TC58NC1202GST) and then finally the four Toshiba 96-layer BiCS4 3D TLC NAND packages coded TH58LJT0T24-BS8C. The SSD Utility lets you check on the drive’s capacity, how it’s being used and how much life is left in the SSD. There’s a tuning section with an integrated benchmark so you can see how the drive is running. It also allows for easy implementation of firmware updates and there is a comprehensive help section as well. For testing, the drives are all wiped and reset to factory settings by HDDerase V4. We try to use free or easily available programs and some real world testing so you can compare our findings against your own system. This is a good way to measure potential upgrade benefits. Main system: Intel Core i7-7700K with 16GB of DDR4-3200 RAM, Sapphire R9 390 Nitro and an Asus Prime Z270-A motherboard. Other drives 500GB Class Corsair Force MP500 480GB Gigabyte Aorus RGB 512GB Intel Optane SSD900P 480GB Intel Optane SSD905P 480GB Intel SSD760p 512GB Kingston A1000 480GB Lexar NM600 480GB Plextor M9Pe(Y) 512GB Plextor M8PeG 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400 512GB Western Digital Blue SN500 500GB Software: Atto Disk Benchmark 3.05 / 4.00 CrystalMark 6.0.0. AS SSD 2.0. IOMeter. Futuremark PC Mark 8 All our results were achieved by running each test five times with every configuration this ensures that any glitches are removed from the results. Trim is confirmed as running by typing fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify into the command line. A response of disabledeletenotify =0 confirms TRIM is active. CrystalDiskMark is a useful benchmark to measure theoretical performance levels of hard drives and SSD’s. We are using v6.0. The RC500's performance at a QD of 32 in CrystalDiskMark is nothing really to shout about, but looking at the two result screens the in-house controller is much happier dealing with compressible data for both Sequential, 4K QD1 and QD8 reads. The RC500 shows stronger performance, especially writes at QD1, which is where most of the workloads of normal everyday use occur. The ATTO Disk Benchmark performance measurement tool is compatible with Microsoft Windows. Measure your storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for reads and writes. Several options are available to customize your performance measurement including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. Use ATTO Disk Benchmark to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives and notice that ATTO products will consistently provide the highest level of performance to your storage. We are using version 3.5 for our NVMe disk tests but will be switching over to version 4, so we've included a results chart for this as well. The official Sequential read/write figures for the 500GB version of the RC500 are up to 1,700MB/s and 1,600MB/s respectively. As you can see from the results chart, we can confirm that write figure but sailed past the maximum read figure at 3,438MB/s. The reason for this is, as we have seen from the CrystalDiskMark test, the controller in the RC500 seems too much prefer dealing with compressible data when it comes to Sequential reads and as it happens, that's what ATTO uses to test with, hence the read result. Using ATTO 4.0 at the default 4-thread setting we saw lower read/write speeds than we saw with ATTO 3.0 at 3,190MB/s and 1,530MB/s respectively. Dropping down the thread depth to 1, the write speed rose slightly to 1,5400MB/s while the read speed dropped to 2,850MB/s. AS SSD is a great free tool designed just for benching Solid State Drives. It performs an array of sequential read and write tests, as well as random read and write tests with sequential access times over a portion of the drive. AS SSD includes a sub suite of benchmarks with various file pattern algorithms but this is difficult in trying to judge accurate performance figures. For a drive aimed at the value end of the market, the RC500 shows strong performance in the ASSSD benchmark. IOMeter is another open-source synthetic benchmarking tool which is able to simulate the various loads placed on a hard drive and solid-state drive technology. There are many ways to measure the IOPS performance of a Solid State Drive, so our results will sometimes differ from the manufacturer’s quoted ratings. We do test all drives in exactly the same way, so the results are directly comparable. We test 128KB Sequential read and write and random read and write 4k tests. The test setup’s for the tests are listed below. Each is run five times. 128KB Sequential Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 128KB Span: 8GB Thread(s): 1, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Sustained Random Read / Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Thread(s): 4, Outstanding I/O: 1-32 Test Run: 20 minutes per test 4K Random 70/30 mix Read/Write. Transfer Request Size: 4KB Span: 80GB Reads: 70% Writes: 30% Thread(s): 4 Outstanding I/O: 2 – 32 Test Run: 20 minutes Unlike the ATTO Sequential read results, our own Sequential read test saw the drive produce a figure of 1,770.88MB/s at a QD of 32, much more in line with the official figure of 1,700MB/s with a peak figure of 1,772.68MB/s coming at QD16. When it came to Sequential writes at a QD of 32 we got a figure of 1,640.81MB/s, slightly more than the official 1,600MB/s. In our tests, the drive actually peaked at 1,655.91MB/s at the QD8 mark. 128KB Sequential Read Performance v QD comparison The RC500 shows solid performance at QD1 before falling back in QD's 2 and 4 before picking back up again at QD32. 128KB Sequential Write Performance v QD comparison The Sequential write performance of the RC500 is much more consistent than the read, throughout the tested QD's. 4K random read performance is quoted as up to 290,000 IOPS (CrystalDiskMark 6 QD8 Threads 8). With our 4 threaded test, we saw a maximum figure of 235,522 IOPS. However, a look at the save file from the CrystalDiskMark 6 tests we ran, revealed a figure of 297,793 IOPS, confirming the official random read figure. 4K Random Read v QD Performance comparison The random read performance of the RC500 puts it into the top 5 of the 500GB class drives we've tested throughout the tested queue depths. The official random write figure for the drive is up to 390,000 IOPS (CrystalDiskMark 6 QD8 Threads 8). With our 4-threaded tests, the peak performance we saw was 129,074 IOPS at QD16, nowhere near the official number. However, as with the random read performance, looking at the test results save file from CrystalDiskMark 6 revealed a QD8 Threads 8 figure of 401,228 IOPS, some 11,228 IOPS faster than the official maximum. 4K Random Write v QD Performance comparison The 4K random write performance of the drive is about average at a QD of 1 but as the queue depth deepens the RC500 starts to fall behind nearly all of the other drives in our chart. The RC500 displays strong performance in our 70/30 read/write mixed tests. Peak reads in our throughput test occur at the 8MB block mark at 1,558MB/s before dropping back to finish the test run at 1,537MB/s. Peak writes came at the 256KB block size at 1,9227MB/s before falling back to finish the test at 1,548MB/s. Futuremark’s PCMark 8 is a very good all-round system benchmark but it’s Storage Consistency Test takes it to whole new level when testing SSD drives. It runs through four phases; Preconditioning, Degradation, Steady State, Recovery and finally Clean Up. During the Degradation, Steady State and Recovery phases it runs performance tests using the 10 software programs that form the backbone of PCMark 8; Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop Heavy and Photoshop Light, Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Battlefield 3 and World of Warcraft. With some 18 phases of testing, this test can take many hours to run. Preconditioning The drive is written sequentially through up to the reported capacity with random data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. This is done twice. Degradation Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for 10 minutes. It then runs a performance test. These two actions are then repeated 8 times and on each pass, the duration of random writes is increased by 5 minutes. Steady State Run writes of random size between 8 × 512 and 2048 × 512 bytes on random offsets for final duration achieved in degradation phase. A performance test is then run. These actions are then re-run five times. Recovery The drive is idled for 5 minutes. Then a performance test is run. These actions are then repeated five times. Clean Up The drive is written through sequentially up to the reported capacity with zero data, write size of 256 × 512 = 131,072 bytes. Overall, the RC500 seems to handle the rigours of PCMark 8's Consistency test rather well. The only real dip in bandwidth comes at the 2nd SteadyState stage but the drive soon recovers. PCMark 8’s Consistency test provides a huge amount of performance data, so here we’ve looked a little closer at how the RC500 performs in each of the benchmarks test suites. Adobe Creative Cloud The two traces that caused any real problems in the Adobe CC part of the benchmark are the two Photoshop traces, but the drive does recover well from the ordeal. Microsoft Office In the MS Office part of the Consistency test, it's normally the Word test trace that causes a drive problems, but not so with the RC500. For this drive, it's the Excel trace that causes a problem. There is a major drop in performance during the second SteadyState run, the drive falling from 432MB/s down to 134MB/s with a major corresponding peak in latency. However, the drive does quickly recover back to 434MB/s. Casual Gaming The drive certainly handles the Battlefield 3 trace a lot more efficiently than the World of Warcraft one, although the recovery performance from the latter is very good. Just like the Consistency test, PCMark 8’s Standard Storage test also saves a large amount of performance data. The default test runs through the test suite of 10 applications three times. Here we show the total bandwidth performance for each of the individual test suites for the third and final benchmark run. In PCMark 8's Standard Storage test, the RC500 produced strong performances for all the tested apps. When it comes to the overall bandwidth results for the Standard Storage test. the RC500 did really well with a figure of 584.07MB/s. For the long term performance stability test, we set the drive up to run a 20-minute 4K random test with a 30% write, 70% read split, at a Queue Depth of 256 over the entire disk. The RC500 averaged 52,960 IOPS for the test with a performance stability of 38%. To test real life performance of a drive we use a mix of folder/file types and by using the FastCopy utility (which gives a time as well as MB/s result) we record the performance of drive reading from & writing to a 256GB Samsung SSD850 PRO. 100GB data file. 60GB iso image. 60GB Steam folder – 29,521 files. 50GB File folder – 28,523 files. 21GB 8K Movie demos. 12GB Movie folder – 24 files (mix of Blu-ray and 4K files). 11GB 4K Raw Movie Clips (8 MP4V files). 10GB Photo folder – 621 files (mix of png, raw and jpeg images). 10GB Audio folder – 1,483 files (mix of mp3 and .flac files). 5GB (1.5bn pixel) photo. Blu-ray movie Our real-life file transfer test proved no obstacle for the drive. As always with this test, it's dealing with the small file sizes in the 60GB Steam, 50GB File and 10GB Audio folders that slows the drive down. To get a measure of how much faster PCIe NVMe drives are than standard SATA SSD's we use the same files but transfer to and from a 512GB Toshiba OCZ RD400. Taking the SATA drive out of the equation allows the RC500 to show a bit more of what it's capable of. Best write performance came with the 60GB iso transfer at 1,666MB/s while the best read performance came with the 8K Movie Scenes transfer at 1,436MB/s. Kioxia Toshiba's RC500 drive might be aimed at the value end of the market but it's bang up to date with the NAND it uses; Kioxia's BiCS4 96-layer 3D TLC. In fact, its the first consumer drive to use the latest BiCS4 NAND (the first drive we saw it in was the OEM XG6, reviewed here ). For the RC500 the NAND had been combined by an in-house 4-channel controller. Using 96-layers. BiCS4 NAND allows the production 512Gbit dies which gives a 40% increase in capacity over the previous generation of Toshiba 64-layer NAND. Along with the increase in capacity comes an increase in performance as the new NAND supports Toggle 3.0 standards, boosting the interface speed to 667 – 800MT/s from the 400 – 533 MT/s of the previous generation Toggle 2.0. Performance wise, Kioxia quote Sequential figures for the 500GB version of the RC500 of up to 1,700MB/s for reads and up to 1,600MB/s for writes. While we could confirm the write performance with the ATTO benchmark with a figure of 1,644MB/s, the read figure produced by the drive was 3,438MB/s, light years ahead of the official figures. There's a very good reason for the wide difference between the ATTO read result we got and the official read performance rating. For the official Sequential performance figures, Kioxia used CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 (QD32 T1). By default, CrystalDiskMark uses incompressible mostly random data and by looking at the two result screens from our CrystalDiskMark tests it's pretty clear that the controller in the RC500 has a marked preference for compressible data when it comes to reads and that's what ATTO uses to test with, hence the difference between the official and ATTO scores. With our own Sequential tests, we got read/write scores of 1,770MB/s and 1,640MB/s respectively which confirm the official ratings. The random performance of the drive is quoted as up to 290,000 IOPS for reads and up to 390,000 IOPS for writes. Under our 4-threaded testing, the best read/write figures we saw were 235,522 IOPS and 129,074 IOPS respectively. Once again the official figure was gained from running CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 (QD8 T8) and looking at the saved results file from running the benchmark on the review drive, we saw QD8 T8 read/write figures of 297,793 IOPS and 401,228 IOPS respectively, confirming the official figures. The SSD Utility management software may look a bit basic compared to some but it has all the tools you need to maintain the drive as it displays lifespan, capacity usage, temperature as well as supporting firmware updates. There's even a built-in benchmarking tool to run to see how the drive is performing. We found the 500GB Kioxia Toshiba RC500 on Overclockers UK for £58.99 HERE. Pros Overall performance. 5-year warranty. Cons 4K random write performance at deeper queue depths. No 1TB option at the time of writing. KitGuru says: The RC500 uses the latest 96-layer NAND technology which gives it good performance for a drive aimed at the value end of the market. It also comes with a 5-year warranty. It's just a shame that the 500GB model is the largest capacity available at the time of writing.
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