Toshiba Q300 SSD 120GB review

Reviews, Storage

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The Q300 is a popular SSD on Amazon, thanks to its high maximum read and write speeds that essentially max out the SATA III connector. Today, we’re going to test this drive to see how it performs in a variety of benchmarks.

Specs & Features

  • 960GB 480GB 240GB 120GB
  • Max Read : 550 MB/s
  • Max Write : 530 MB/s
  • Interface: SATA 3.0
  • 2.5″ Toshiba Solid State Drive
  • 15 nm 3-bit-per-cell NAND flash, 7mm slim
  • 5 Year Warranty

Design

The Toshiba Q300 looks much like other solid state drives, with a shiny metal enclosure and a matching sticker front and centre.

Inside, you’ll find a TC58NC1000 controller and 15nm TLC NAND flash. TLC or Triple Level Cell flash offers a lower price-per-gigabyte compared to other designs, like SLC (Single Level Cell) and MLC (Multi Level Cell). That’s done by simply increasing the number of bits stored per cell; SLC is one, MLC is two, and TLC is three. You can see how this works in the diagram (made by Anandtech) below.

Image credit: Anandtech

The Q300 is available in capacities of 120GB, 240GB, 480GB or 960GB. We’ve opted for the entry-level 120GB model to test. Note that we’re testing the most recent (ca. 2016) model, rather than the pre-2016 model which reportedly had some issues handling extremely large (>20GB) file transfers.

Testing

In order to test the speed of the drive, we ran four synthetic benchmarks with varying payloads: CrystalDiskMark, AS SSD, ATTO and HD Tune Pro. Combined, these should give us a good idea of the drive’s performance compared to others at a similar price.

The Toshiba A100 we reviewed earlier is the most interesting comparison, but we’ve included other drives we’ve tested in the past as well in case they could be useful.

To see our test rig’s specifications, check out our component breakdown here!

 

CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark has been one of my favourite benchmarks for evaluating storage speeds for a while now, thanks to its varied incompressible workload and extremely readable results. Here’s the 3.0.3 x64 version of the benchmark; all results are in MB/s.

CDM 3 Read Seq 512K 4K 4K QD32
Toshiba Q300 SSD 522 384 30 344
Toshiba A100 SSD 490 328 33 350
Drevo X1 Pro SSD 342 229 35 278
Toshiba P300 HDD 150 48 0.6 1.6
Toshiba H200 Hybrid 115 38 0.6 2.5
Toshiba Canvio Premium 118 43 0.5 0.6
Samsung T3 386 351 33 35
Sandisk Z410 508 357 13 146
Samsung 850 Evo M.2 502 447 45 368
Samsung 850 Evo 513 472 38 408
Samsung 840 Evo 515 473 35 397
Corsair Neutron GTX 450 376 27 328

 

CDM 3 Write Seq 512K 4K 4K QD32
Toshiba Q300 SSD 470 241 99 203
Toshiba A100 SSD 438 406 84 315
Drevo X1 Pro SSD 269 272 88 269
Toshiba P300 HDD 155 69 0.6 1.0
Toshiba H200 Hybrid 114 52 22 24
Toshiba Canvio Premium 117 50 1.3 1.3
Samsung T3 357 352 69 77
Sandisk Z410 407 355 97 250
Samsung 850 Evo M.2 474 394 113 316
Samsung 850 Evo 504 479 68 352
Samsung 840 Evo 500 390 86 313
Corsair Neutron GTX 480 468 69 158

The Q300 shows good performance out of the gate, hitting the highest figures we’ve seen from a SATA-connected drive in sequential read speeds and going near the top of the back in sequential write speeds as well — impressive for a 120GB drive, where write speeds are normally reduced compared to identical drives in higher capacities. 512KB, 4K and 4K queue depth 32 results are also competitive.

AS SSD

AS SSD is another benchmarking tool quite similar to CrystalDiskMark, which uses predominantly incompressible data across a range of workloads including sequential tests, random performance and access times. First three numbers are MB/s and access time is in ms.

AS SSD Read Seq 4K 4K QD64 Acc. Time Score
Toshiba Q300 SSD 522 39 315 N/A 406
Toshiba A100 SSD 489 37 319 N/A 405
Drevo X1 Pro SSD 325 27 249 N/A 308
Toshiba P300 HDD 155 0.5 1.6 N/A 18
Toshiba H200 Hybrid 73 1.8 15 26.3 15
Toshiba Canvio Premium 113 0.5 0.6 23.021 12
Samsung T3 345 24 32 0.100 91
Sandisk Z410 501 11 145 0.045 206
Samsung 850 Evo M.2 493 40 328 0.093 417
Samsung 850 Evo 516 34 382 0.059 467
Samsung 840 Evo 513 32 330 0.059 413
Corsair Neutron GTX 507 25 334 0.068 N/A

 

AS SSD Write Seq 4K 4K QD64 Acc. Time Score
Toshiba Q300 SSD 424 80 96 0.053 219
Toshiba A100 SSD 430 74 288 0.209 405
Drevo X1 Pro SSD 258 76 247 0.046 349
Toshiba P300 HDD 114 0.5 0.6 16.7 13
Toshiba H200 Hybrid 46 19 5 18.2 39
Toshiba Canvio Premium 111 0.5 0.5 17.6 12
Samsung T3 367 56 71 0.055 163
Sandisk Z410 407 78 215 0.237 333
Samsung 850 Evo M.2 475 95 251 0.075 393
Samsung 850 Evo 497 66 299 0.051 415
Samsung 840 Evo 497 69 207 0.054 326
Corsair Neutron GTX 473 62 295 0.062 N/A

The Q300 does well here too, with near-identical speeds to what we saw in the CrystalDiskMark test. The access time reading, which isn’t shown in CDM, is also impressive, although the 4K and 4K queue depth 64 results for writing are a little below what we’d hoped for. Again, this is likely a result of the relatively small 120GB capacity, although even the 64GB Drevo X1 Pro did better here.

Note that there is a ‘read access times’ bug in AS SSD under the current version of Windows 10; there is always an error message for that portion of the test and no result is rendered.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Atto Read 1KB 4KB 64KB 256KB 1MB 8MB
Toshiba Q300 SSD 74 294 548 551 552 553
Toshiba A100 SSD 76 286 552 548 561 561
Drevo X1 Pro SSD 71 232 348 347 348 348
Toshiba P300 HDD 27 85 129 123 135 190
Toshiba H200 Hybrid 9 20 26 26 26 26
Toshiba Canvio Premium 9 33 117 117 117 118
Samsung T3 18 67 329 371 377 404
Sandisk Z410 78 247 518 531 536 533
Samsung 850 Evo M.2 83 286 537 553 552 553
Samsung 850 Evo 80 269 538 551 558 558
Samsung 840 Evo 94 280 535 551 555 555
Corsair Neutron GTX 15 61 336 452 530 540

 

Atto Write 1KB 4KB 64KB 256KB 1MB 8MB
Toshiba Q300 SSD 54 231 487 488 490 485
Toshiba A100 SSD 53 231 524 533 534 543
Drevo X1 Pro SSD 68 201 270 270 267 271
Toshiba P300 HDD 16 74 120 113 123 128
Toshiba H200 Hybrid 3 25 37 55 53 53
Toshiba Canvio Premium 10 41 115 115 116 116
Samsung T3 20 71 315 365 366 388
Sandisk Z410 69 184 419 423 426 428
Samsung 850 Evo M.2 79 251 510 526 525 525
Samsung 850 Evo 83 255 519 529 534 534
Samsung 840 Evo 81 260 515 527 533 534
Corsair Neutron GTX 15 142 474 470 493 498

Atto is always an interesting test because it shows the relationship between data set size and read and write speeds in considerable detail.

The Q300 reaches full speed quite quickly, just after the 32KB data size mark. The drive doesn’t quite reach its quoted 530 MB/s writes, but it does reach (and even exceed) its 550 MB/s read speed from 128KB blocks onwards.

HD Tune Pro

We conclude with HD Tune Pro, a benchmark which produces three scores for average read speed, read access time, and burst read rate.

 

HD Tune Pro 5.50 Read Average Access Time Burst Rate
Toshiba Q300 SSD 425 MB/s 0.0ms 69 MB/s
Toshiba A100 SSD 330 MB/s 0.042 ms 99 MB/s
Drevo X1 Pro SSD 356 MB/s 0.042 ms 248 MB/s
Toshiba P300 HDD 126 MB/s 14.6 ms 294 MB/s
Toshiba H200 Hybrid 90 MB/s 16.9 ms 87 MB/s
Toshiba Canvio Premium 114 MB/s 17.9 ms 140 MB/s
Samsung T3 269 MB/s 0.090 ms 171 MB/s
Sandisk Z410 358 MB/s 0.035 ms 140 MB/s
Samsung 850 Evo M.2 321 MB/s 0.087 ms 221 MB/s
Samsung 850 Evo 370 MB/s 0.044 ms 250 MB/s
Samsung 840 Evo 358 MB/s 0.041 ms 231 MB/s
Corsair Neutron GTX 340 MB/s 0.059 ms 231 MB/s

The Q300 shows good consistency here, with a minimum of 392 MB/s and a maximum of 443 MB/s. That’s good for an average of 425 MB/s, the best result we’ve seen in this test (apart from our resident NVMe 1TB drive). The access time of 0.0 is a little interesting, but thankfully we’ve already got a figure for this — 0.053ms — that is more than acceptable.

Wrapping up

The Q300 lives up to its promises, delivering excellent read performance and strong write performance that come right up to the limit of the SATA III connector. If you’re not able or willing to move to a faster but more expensive PCI-e connected drive, the Q300 is a wise choice despite its slightly elevated price.

See the Toshiba Q300 on Amazon

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Last modified: February 22, 2018

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