Toshiba OCZ RC100 SSD Review – M.2 2242 PCIe NVMe

Linear Write, Temperature and File Transfers

AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

We’ve had some people ask for AIDA64 linear write tests to be done, so we fired that utility up to see what would happen.

When you take a look at extended sustained write performance you’ll see that the performance started out at around 1070 MB/s and dropped down to around 300 MB/s for the remainder of the run. The lowest write speed recorded was just over 222 MB/s and than occurred after all the SLC cache was full and data was being written directly to the 3D TLC NAND Flash.

Temperature Testing

The Toshiba OCZ RC100 has a temperature sensor, but we don’t know where it is actually located. We’ve asked Toshiba for more information and they were unable to get us answers as to where the temperature is being read from and what the safe temperature range is. That said, we noted our Toshiba RC100 480GB had an idle temperature of 60C and that it went up to around 72C during use.

During our advanced testing we enabled PCI Express Active State Power Management (ASPM) on our desktop board and in Windows 10. Enabling ASPM allows a PCIe link to be slowed down to save power when not being used. When enabling this feature the idle power of the Toshiba RC100 480GB drive dropped from 1040mW to 624mW and the idle temperate went from 62C down to 49C. This is because the drive was using the L1 low-power state! Enabling ASPM might still scare some folks, but the specification has been out for many years and it helps drop power consumption and temperatures.

Here is a shot of what happens to power on our test system when you go from ‘Maximum Power Savings’ to ‘Off’ under Windows 10 power options when testing with on our programmable power module by Quarch Technology.

Real World File Transfer

Let’s see how real-world was when writing a movie folder containing seven 1080P movies over to the SSD. For this test, we are going to measure write performance by transferring over a 30.6GB folder of movies off of a PCIe NVMe SSD to the drive being tested to see how performance looks.

The Toshiba OCZ RC100 480GB drive finished our file transfer test at 579.7 MB/s, which puts it in the middle of the pack for this test. We were impressed though as it did finish faster than some PCIe NVMe drives like the Intel Optane 800P 118GB, Samsung SSD 960 EVO 250GB, ADATA GAMMIX S10 512GB, and Intel SSD 600p 512GB drive. This drive isn’t the fastest that we have seen, but it does well for a tiny DRAM-less drive!