Toshiba HG2 43nm 256GB Solid State Drive Review

HD Tune v4.01 – Random Access

The random access read and write test is a very important performance area to look at on solid state drives as some controllers have problems with random writes. In recent years the controllers have improved and the firmware has been better optimized for random read and write performance.

Random Access Read Test Results:

Benchmark Results: When it comes to the random access read performance test the Toshiba HG2 256GB SSD drive did fairly well with solid average access times and what we would call mainstream performance in both IOPS and MB/s. The 4KB speed on the Toshiba HG2 256GB SSD was 28MB/s, which wasn’t that far behind the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB as it had an average speed of 31.5MB/s while the Vertex LE was at 33.4MB/s.

When it comes to operations per second (IOPS) the Toshiba HG2 256GB SSD had 7164 IOPS at 4KB, which is close to the 8079 IOPS on the C300 and 8752 IOPS that the Vertex LE. As good as these scores sound the Intel X25-M G2 160GB drive had 16021 IOPS in the 4KB read test and is still the drive to beat when it comes to small read file size tests.

Random Access Write Test Results:

Benchmark Results: The write performance test results of the Toshiba HG2 256GB SSD were solid looking once again at 14.3MB/s. It should be pointed out that the Crucial RealSSD C300 256GB was able to reach 10MB/s read on the 4KB write tests, so this drive actually beat the mighty SATA 6Gbps SSD!

4KB Random Write File Test Results Chart:

Benchmark Results: Many of our readers have asked for a chart showing side-by-side comparisons of the drives we have tested in the 4KB random access write test. You can see from this chart that the Toshiba HG2 256GB SSD was far from leading the charts, but it wasn’t at the bottom either.