Toshiba isn't a name that readily comes to mind when choosing a solid-state drive, which is surprising considering it invented NAND flash 25 years ago. But while companies like OCZ, Intel, Kingston, Corsair, Samsung and myriad others are shouting about their SSDs, the fact that Toshiba makes SSDs as well as the NAND chips inside them tends to pass people by. Back in June 2012 Toshiba announced the world's first 19nm NAND equipped SSDs, but only now do we have a drive for review. Unfortunately for Toshiba, in the time since the announcement two other manufacturer's drives using its latest NAND have already visited our test bench: Plextor's M5 Pro Series and the latest drive from Kingston, the SSDNow V300. Toshiba quotes the max sequential read speed at 524MB/s, with the sequential write speed quoted at 461MB/s for everything bar the 64GB drive. Under test conditions using the ATTO benchmark these figures seem a little on the safe side, as the drive produced a read score of 554MB/s and 511MB/s for the writes. That performance sits the Toshiba drive in between the two other 19nm NAND users we've tested. Control yourself Unlike the ubiquitous SandForce controller, the Marvell controller isn't particularly bothered about what type of data it is working with. Comparing sequential read/write scores for the default incompressible and compressible data tests in AS SSD shows this nicely, and results in 512MB/s and 477MB/s for the read/writes respectively for the default test, and 509MB
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