Kioxia Toshiba RC500 500GB SSD Review

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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