Upon writing this post I find it hard to grasp that it's been a while since I've covered any hard drives of sorts, in particularly solid state drives. When I do decide to post articles that entails storage drives, it's one that's peaked my desired interest. Toshiba's newly launched TR200 series SSD's has done such, it's swayed my interest.
The TR200 SSD, in terms of capacity, affordability, and outer shell design most certainly in my opinion don't set itself apart from an already crowded market of SSD's. Its whats inside the storage drive, the embedded technology that sets itself apart from the rest.
Toshiba New TR200 series SSD's built around a 64-Layer 3-bit-per-cell TLC or triple level cell BiCS Flash, going with a legacy SATA interface that still caters to the novice PC builder.
In further breaking down Toshibas new storage technology, BiCS flash memory implements a three dimensional stacked structure of cells, high density applications such as Photoshop and Adobe Premiere should take full advantage of this type of inner drive structure, potentially offering much higher endurance than the standard 3D NAND Flash memory that's in most SSD's today, and also dispersing lower power output.
All Toshiba drives that fall in the TR200 series have a standard form factor measuring 2.5" which is very much identical to most SATA SSD's on the market. The outer shell is constructed out of metal, features being mundane at best, again nothing we haven't seen already on any SSD.
Internally, as mentioned earlier in this post you'll find the Toshiba TR2000 with a third generation 64-Layer 3-bit-per-cell TLC BiCS 3D Flash that's based on the 15nm floating gate technology. The controller within these drives are small with a thermal pad layered over the chip.
Now there are other SSD's that are still being released under the OCZ branding ( Toshiba acquired OCZ assets for $35 million back in 2013) , but since the topic of this article entails the Toshiba TR200 series SDDs, lets focus on its overall specs. For starters, it has a SATA 6Gbit/s Interface, with an 2.5 inch form factor and of course you already know about the 3D TLC flash component. It's storage capacity range from 240GB to 960GB. Though the technology within this drive is pretty impressive, performance wise its average at best, posting read/write speed coming in at 550 MB/s / 525 MB/s.
High octane performance with the TR200 SSDs in terms of speed is not expected according to Toshiba. These particular drives are basically for the budget conscious builders.